IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gde/journl/gde_v70_n1_p25-64.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The public-private pay gap: a robust quantile approach

Author

Listed:
  • Domenico Depalo
  • Raffaella Giordano

    () (Bank of Italy
    Bank of Italy)

Abstract

We investigate the public-private pay gap in Italy in the period 1998-2008. Under random sampling we estimate an average wage di_erential in favour of public sector workers of about 14% for women and 4% for men, lower at the high tail of the wage distribution and in the Northern regions. The di_erential increases when also unobservable motivations that may induce workers to prefer employment in the public sector are considered, in particular above the median of the distribution, therefore suggesting that extra-motives may play an important role overall at higher wage levels.

Suggested Citation

  • Domenico Depalo & Raffaella Giordano, 2011. "The public-private pay gap: a robust quantile approach," Giornale degli Economisti, GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University, vol. 70(1), pages 25-64, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:gde:journl:gde_v70_n1_p25-64
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Fabien Postel-Vinay & Hélène Turon, 2007. "The Public Pay Gap in Britain: Small Differences That (Don't?) Matter," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 117(523), pages 1460-1503, October.
    2. Hansen, Lars Peter, 1982. "Large Sample Properties of Generalized Method of Moments Estimators," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(4), pages 1029-1054, July.
    3. Bargain, Olivier & Melly, Blaise, 2008. "Public Sector Pay Gap in France: New Evidence Using Panel Data," IZA Discussion Papers 3427, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
    4. Heyes, Anthony, 2005. "The economics of vocation or 'why is a badly paid nurse a good nurse'?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 24(3), pages 561-569, May.
    5. Rosella Levaggi, 2007. "Tax Evasion and the Cost of Public Sector Activities," Public Finance Review, , vol. 35(5), pages 572-585, September.
    6. Carlo Dell'Aringa & Claudio Lucifora & Federica Origo, 2007. "Public Sector Pay And Regional Competitiveness. A First Look At Regional Public-Private Wage Differentials In Italy," Manchester School, University of Manchester, vol. 75(4), pages 445-478, July.
    7. Pedro Portugal & Mário Centeno, 2001. "Wages of Civil Servants," Economic Bulletin and Financial Stability Report Articles, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    8. Holmlund, Bertil, 1993. "Wage setting in private and public sectors in a model with endogenous government behavior," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 9(2), pages 149-162, May.
    9. Hausman, Jerry, 2015. "Specification tests in econometrics," Applied Econometrics, Publishing House "SINERGIA PRESS", vol. 38(2), pages 112-134.
    10. Lorenzo Forni & Raffaela Giordano, 2003. "Employment in the Public Sector," CESifo Working Paper Series 1085, CESifo Group Munich.
    11. Bender, Keith A, 1998. " The Central Government-Private Sector Wage Differential," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(2), pages 177-220, April.
    12. Claudio Lucifora & Dominique Meurs, 2006. "The Public Sector Pay Gap In France, Great Britain And Italy," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 52(1), pages 43-59, March.
    13. Dustmann, Christian & van Soest, Arthur, 1998. "Public and private sector wages of male workers in Germany," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 42(8), pages 1417-1441, September.
    14. Francesca Barigozzi & Gilberto Turati, 2009. "Human Health Care and Selection Effects. Understanding Labour Supply in the Market for Nurses," CHILD Working Papers wp18_09, CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY.
    15. Breusch, Trevor & Qian, Hailong & Schmidt, Peter & Wyhowski, Donald, 1999. "Redundancy of moment conditions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 91(1), pages 89-111, July.
    16. Niskanen, William A, 1975. "Bureaucrats and Politicians," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 18(3), pages 617-643, December.
    17. Joshua Angrist & Victor Chernozhukov & Iván Fernández-Val, 2006. "Quantile Regression under Misspecification, with an Application to the U.S. Wage Structure," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 74(2), pages 539-563, March.
    18. Gregory, Robert G. & Borland, Jeff, 1999. "Recent developments in public sector labor markets," Handbook of Labor Economics,in: O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 3, chapter 53, pages 3573-3630 Elsevier.
    19. Chernozhukov, Victor & Hansen, Christian & Jansson, Michael, 2007. "Inference approaches for instrumental variable quantile regression," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 95(2), pages 272-277, May.
    20. Blaise Melly, 2005. "Public-private sector wage differentials in Germany: Evidence from quantile regression," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 30(2), pages 505-520, September.
    21. Carlo V Fiorio & Francesco D'Amuri, 2005. "Workers' Tax Evasion in Italy," Giornale degli Economisti, GDE (Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia), Bocconi University, vol. 64(2-3), pages 247-270, November.
    22. Don Bellante & Albert N. Link, 1981. "Are Public Sector Workers More Risk Averse Than Private Sector Workers?," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 34(3), pages 408-412, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Antón, José-Ignacio & Muñoz de Bustillo, Rafael, 2013. "Public-private sector wage differentials in Spain. An updated picture in the midst of the Great Recession," MPRA Paper 48897, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Domenico Depalo & Raffaela Giordano & Evangelia Papapetrou, 2015. "Public–private wage differentials in euro-area countries: evidence from quantile decomposition analysis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 49(3), pages 985-1015, November.
    3. repec:spr:izalpo:v:7:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1186_s40173-017-0093-1 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. repec:pra:mprapa:48888 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Jelena Lausev, 2014. "WHAT HAS 20 YEARS OF PUBLIC–PRIVATE PAY GAP LITERATURE TOLD US? EASTERN EUROPEAN TRANSITIONING vs. DEVELOPED ECONOMIES," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 28(3), pages 516-550, July.
    6. repec:sgh:gosnar:y:2017:i:1:p:5-31 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Kollintzas, Tryphon & Papageorgiou, Dimitris & Vassilatos, Vanghelis, 2013. "A Neoclassical Growth Model for the Insiders – Outsiders Society," CEPR Discussion Papers 9640, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    8. Tryphon Kollintzas & Dimitris Papageorgiou & Efthymios Tsionas & Vanghelis Vassilatos, 2018. "Market and political power interactions in Greece: an empirical investigation," IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Springer;Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA), vol. 7(1), pages 1-43, December.
    9. Gabriela Grotkowska & Leszek Wincenciak & Tomasz Gajderowicz, 2017. "Evolution of the Public-Sector Wage Premium in Poland," Gospodarka Narodowa, Warsaw School of Economics, issue 1, pages 5-31.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    public employment; wage di_erentials; wage determination;

    JEL classification:

    • H50 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - General
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • J50 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gde:journl:gde_v70_n1_p25-64. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Erika Somma). General contact details of provider: http://www.gde.unibocconi.it/ .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.