Public-Private Employment Choice, Wage Differentials, and Gender in Turkey.

This article examines how individuals are selected into employment in public administration, state-owned enterprises and covered private sectors and considers the wage determination in these sectors in Turkey. Individual-level data from the 1994 Household Expenditure Survey are used to assess the sectoral differentials for men and women separately. A brief discussion of theoretical considerations appears in Section II. An overview of employment and wage-setting practices in public and private sectors in Turkey is provided in Section III. The conceptual framework and the empirical specification of the sectoral choice and wage equations are described in Section IV. Section V introduces the data used in this study. Estimation results are presented in Section VI. Section VII provides the policy implications of the results. Conclusions and suggestions for future research appear in Section VIII. One of the main findings is that when controlled for observed characteristics and sample selection, public administration wages are higher than covered private sector wages for men, except at the university level, where there is parity between public administration and the private sector.