Labor Supply of Politicians

Raymond Fisman, Nikolaj A. Harmon, Emir Kamenica, Inger Munk

NBER Working Paper No. 17726
Issued in January 2012
NBER Program(s):   LS   POL

We examine the labor supply of politicians using data on Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). We exploit the introduction of a law that equalized MEPs' salaries, which had previously differed by as much as a factor of ten. Doubling an MEP's salary increases the probability of running for reelection by 23 percentage points and increases the logarithm of the number of parties that field a candidate by 29 percent of a standard deviation. A salary increase has no discernible impact on absenteeism or shirking from legislative sessions; in contrast, non-pecuniary motives, proxied by home-country corruption, substantially impact the intensive margin of labor supply. Finally, an increase in salary lowers the quality of elected MEPs, measured by the selectivity of their undergraduate institutions.

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17726

Published: Raymond Fisman & Nikolaj A. Harmon & Emir Kamenica & Inger Munk, 2015. "LABOR SUPPLY OF POLITICIANS," Journal of the European Economic Association, vol 13(5), pages 871-905. citation courtesy of

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