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This paper addresses the role played by Public Sector (PS) employment across different OECD labour markets in explaining: (i) gender differences regarding choices to work in either PS or private sector, and (ii) subsequent changes in female labour market outcomes. To do so, we provide some empirical evidence about cross-country gender differences in choice of employment in the PS vs. the private sector, using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), in the light of different theories on gender behaviour in the labour market. We also analyze the main determinants of the hourly wage gaps across these two sectors for males and females separately. Finally, we document the main stylized facts about labour market transitions by male and female workers among inactivity, unemployment, working in the PS and working in the private sector.

The paper analyzes the relationship between career path characteristics of civil servants and their career success. Following a description of the institutional setting and some qualitative evidence on typical paths to the top, we use data that follows the careers of all Swedish civil servants for up to 24 years to document a clear link between early mobility and later success. Controlling for a wide range of other factors, incidents of inter-organizational mobility within the administration, but also interchanges between the administrative and other sectors are positively associated with becoming a senior government offcial. We also show that the positive association between mobility and future success is smaller for more educated workers, which is consistent with signalling e ffects driving the link between mobility and career success.

"Starting with a comparative assessment of different welfare regimes and political economies from the perspective of gender awareness and "pro-women" policies, this paper identifies the determinants of cross-national variation in women's chances of being in a high-status occupation in twelve West European countries. Special emphasis is given to size and structure of the service sector, including share of women in public employment and structural factors such as trade union density and employment protection. The first level of comparison between men and women concentrates on gender representation in the higher echelons of the job hierarchy, while in the second section we extend the scope of analysis, comparing women in high-status occupations and low-wage employment in order to allow for a more nuanced study of gender and class interaction. The first analysis is based on European Social Survey data for the years 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008, capturing recent trends in occupational dynamics. Results indicate that in general a large service sector and a high trade union density enhance women's chances of being in a high-status occupations while more specifically a large public sector helps to reduce channeling women in low-wage employment. Thus, equality at the top can well be paired with inequality at the bottom, as postindustrial countries with a highly polarized occupational hierarchy such as the UK show." (author's abstract)

I build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions and two sectors in order to study the labour market effects of public sector employment and wages. Public sector wages plays an important role in achieving the efficient allocation. High wages induce too many unemployed to queue for public sector jobs, while if they are low, the government faces recruitment problems. The optimal steady-state wage premium depends mainly on the labour market friction parameters. In response to technology shocks, it is optimal to have procyclical public sector wages. Deviations from the optimal policy can increase the volatility of unemployment significantly. Public sector wage and employment shocks have mixed effects on unemployment. A wage shock raises the unemployment rate, while a reduction in the separations lowers it. Hiring more people can increase or decrease the unemployment rate. All shocks raise the wage and crowd out employment in the private sector. In the empirical part, I employ Bayesian methods to estimate the parameters of the model for the United States. I find that the direct search mechanism between the two sectors is an important element to explain business cycle fluctuations of the labour market variables.

This paper investigates the relationship between public sector employment and fiscal decentralization. We develop a theoretical framework modeling the interactions between the central and subnational executives regarding the level of public employment at the central and subnational government levels. In our empirical work, based on a large cross-country dataset, we find that, ceteris paribus, the level of total public sector employees in a country increases with its level of fiscal decentralization. Even though central government employment decreases with decentralization, this is more than fully offset by the increase in employment at the subnational level accompanying decentralization. Our empirical results also indicate that the relationship between GDP per capita and public sector employment is not monotonic but quadratic, that total public sector employment is higher in unitary countries vis-à-vis federal countries, and that public employment increases with the country’s international economic openness.

The public expenditure and institutional assessment (PEIA) were motivated by a number of factors. First, both the Government of Iraq (GoI) and its international development partners have recognized the critical importance of sound management of Iraq's substantial public financial resources. Both parties support the reform and modernization of public financial management (PFM), as articulated in the International Compact for Iraq (ICI). Secondly, international experience demonstrates the importance of establishing a baseline against which progress in PFM over time can be measured. This implies the need for an assessment which provides the information necessary to measure the performance of a country's PFM system. Thirdly, the devastating circumstances in Iraq during the past 5 years have made the institutional arrangements for PFM the subject of considerable uncertainty. The PEIA can help to shape and prioritize the necessary development program. The report is organized in two main parts. Volume one contains a summary of the main issues to emerge from the public expenditure and financial accountability (PEFA) assessment and a discussion of a number of specific PFM issues of current importance to Iraq, including: capital investment budgeting (CIB), oil revenue management, the Iraq financial management information system (IFMIS), public accounting and accountability, and payroll management. Volume two contains a detailed technical analysis behind the PEFA assessment.

This article shows that state control of some industries may have contributed to the increase in European unemployment from the 1970s to the early 1990s. We develop a simple two-sector model, one privately-run and one publicly-run, that has risk-averse workers directing their search into one of the sectors. Assuming that the privately-run sector is less able to insure its employees against uncertainty, we show that aggregate unemployment in this economy increases in response to an increase in economic turbulence. In this article, we focus on the role of state control in the explanation of the rise of European unemployment since the late 1970s. We argue that state control of some sectors of the economy can contribute to the rise in aggregate unemployment in presence of an increase in economic turbulence. We follow Ljungqvist and Sargent (1998) in claiming that the world economy has been subjected to significant increases in turbulence since the late 1970s. We interpret the increase in turbulence as the increase in the instability of earnings over this time period. 2 In simple terms the mechanism we propose in the article is as follows. In an economy with two sectors, one privately-run and one publicly-run, the benevolent government must choose how many vacancies to open in the public sector, and, in effect, in which

Despite the potential for free-riding, workers motivated by ‘making a difference’ to the mission or output of an establishment may donate labour to it. When the establishment uses performance related compensation (PRC), these labour donations closely resemble a standard private provision of public goods problem, and are not rational in large labour pools. Without PRC, however, the problem differs significantly from a standard private provision of public goods situation. Specifically, in equilibrium: there need not be free-riding, decisions are non-monotonic in valuations, and contribution incentives are significant even in large populations. When PRC is not used, the establishment tends to favour setting low wages which help to select a labour force driven by concern for the firm’s output. Expected output can actually fall with the wage in this situation. For sufficiently high levels of risk aversion, performance related pay can yield less expected output than when compensation is output independent.

This study examined the effects of the organizational environment upon the performance and structural characteristics of public agencies, while also assessing the effects of agency characteristics upon performance. Relevant literature indicated that models of the public sector agency environment lack adequate theoretical foundation and empirical analysis. Private sector studies suggest that complexity, resource capacity, and turbulence are present in the environment. However, no study has modeled these dimensions simultaneously in the public sector. This study used factor analysis of community-level variables and found that all three dimensions, plus the dimension of violent crime, are characteristics salient to the public sector. The performance of municipal police departments in Texas was examined in light of these environmental dimensions. Departments were surveyed to obtain organizational data; 78 departments responded. Agency performance was operationalized as the average clearance rate of Part One Index offenses for 1990-1994. The rate was also broken down for violent and property offenses. Regression analysis revealed a consistently negative significant effect upon performance for complexity. No statistically significant effects were observed for turbulence, resource capacity, or the violent crime factor. Factor analysis of organizational data extracted four dimensions: size, complexity, occupational differentiation, and officer capacity. The environmental factors were then used in regression analysis for each of these organizational factors. All four factors had significant effects upon organizational characteristics. Most salient was the finding that violent crime has a strong positive influence upon organizational size, complexity, and officer capacity. The organizational factors were also used to explain performance. The officer capacity factor had a significant (though modest) effect upon clearance rates. All other organizational variables had no significant effects. A model with both environmental and organizational factors demonstrated that only environmental complexity and officer capacity had statistically significant effects. However, the negative effects of complexity were greater than the positive effects of officer capacity. Overall, this study demonstrated that public sector performance is constrained by external conditions, which exhibit profound negative influences. Organizational characteristics do not generally provide significant positive effects, suggesting that performance improvements are quite marginal and subject to limitations beyond organizational control.