Public Sector Pay Gap in France: New Evidence Using Panel Data
Olivier Bargain and
Blaise Melly ()
No 3427, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Abstract:
We estimate the public wage gap in France for the period 1990-2002, both at the mean and at different quantiles of the wage distribution, for men and women separately. We account for unobserved heterogeneity by using fixed effects estimations on panel data and, departing from usual practice, allow the public wage markup to vary over time. We also provide one of the very first applications of fixed effects quantile regressions. Contrary to common belief, results convey that monetary returns are not fundamentally different in the public sector. Firstly, public wage ‘premia’ (for women) or ‘penalties’ (for men) are essentially the result of selection. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, only small pay differences between sectors remain over time, reflecting fluctuations due to specific public policies and to the pro-cyclicality of private sector wages. The long-term difference is essentially zero. Secondly, the relative compression of the wage distribution by the public sector is also partly due to unobserved characteristics. The most natural explanation for these results is that the civil sector manages to attract better workers in the lower part of the distribution, in part because of non-monetary gains (including job protection), but fails to retain the most productive ones at the top.
Keywords: wage gap; public sector; selection; fixed effects; quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C14 C21 J31 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2008-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)
Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3427.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3427
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().