Measuring rents from public employment : regression discontinuity evidence from Kenya
- Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar privatesector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan government’s algorithm for hiring eighteen-thousand new teachers in 2010 in a regression discontinuity design. Fuzzy regression discontinuity estimates yield a civil-service wage premium of over 100 percent (not attributable to observed or unobserved skills), but no effect on motivation, suggesting rent-sharing as the most plausible explanation for the wage premium.
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| Author: | Nicholas Barton, Tessa Bold, Justin Sandefur |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-443777 |
| URL: | https://www.cgdev.org/publication/measuring-rents-public-employment-regression-discontinuity-evidence-kenya |
| Parent Title (English): | Working Paper ; 457 |
| Series (Serial Number): | Working paper / Center for Global Development (457) |
| Publisher: | Center for Global Development |
| Place of publication: | Washington, DC |
| Document Type: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2017/10/26 |
| Date of first Publication: | 2017/06/21 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2017/10/26 |
| Tag: | civil servants; motivation; public sector wages; teachers; wage gap |
| Issue: | Working Paper 457 |
| Page Number: | 54 |
| Note: | The Center for Global Development is an independent, nonprofit policy research organization dedicated to reducing global poverty and inequality and to making globalization work for the poor. Use and dissemination of this Working Paper is encouraged; however, reproduced copies may not be used for commercial purposes. Further usage is permitted under the terms of the Creative Commons License. |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 419756620 |
| Institutes: | Wirtschaftswissenschaften / Wirtschaftswissenschaften |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 33 Wirtschaft / 330 Wirtschaft |
| Sammlungen: | Universitätspublikationen |
| Licence (English): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Nicht kommerziell 4.0 |
