TY  - JOUR
AU  - Poterba,James M.
AU  - Rueben,Kim S.
TI  - The Distribution of Public Sector Wage Premia: New Evidence Using       Quantile Regression Methods
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 4734
PY  - 1994
Y2  - May 1994
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4734
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w4734.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
James M. Poterba
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-350
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA  02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-6673
Fax: 617/258-7804
E-Mail: poterba@nber.org

Kim Rueben
Urban Institute
2100 M Street NW
Washington DC 20037
Tel: 202-261-5662
Fax: Senior Research Associate
E-Mail: krueben@ui.urban.org
AB  - This paper documents the changing pattern of wage differentials between state and local government employees and their private sector counterparts during the 1979-1992 period.  While the relative wages of women employed in the two sectors changed very little during this period, the relative wages of men employed in the state and local sector rose nearly 8%.  There is substantial heterogeneity in the changes in relative wages of public and private sector employees during the 1980s.  For highly educated workers, private sector wages rose significantly faster than public sector wages, while for those with at most a high school education, the public sector wage premium increased.  We present both least squares and quantile regression estimates of the public sector premium.  While the level of this premium is sensitive to our choice of quantile, the change in the premium, and the estimated pattern across skill levels, is not substantially affected by varying the quantile.
ER  -