<p>This paper uses microeconomic data from the British Household Panel and General Household
</p><p>Surveys to describe how the distribution of pay differs between the public and private sectors in
</p><p>1983 and in the early 1990s. Separate analyses by gender and education group reveal that it is
</p><p>women and those with intermediate-level qualifications who do best in the public sector. The large differences between the shapes of the conditional (that is, holding age and education constant)distributions of wages in the public and private sectors are demonstrated using quantile regressions estimated separately for each education group. The paper also exploits the longitudinal structure of the data used to assess how much of these differences can be explained by the unobserved characteristics of individuals.</p>
Authors
Richard Disney
Research Associate University of Sussex
Richard is an IFS Research Associate, a Part-time Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex and a Visiting Professor of Economics at UCL.
Amanda Gosling
Journal article details
- ISSN
- Print: 0143-5671 Online: 1475-5890
- JEL
- J31, J45.
- Issue
- November 1998
Suggested citation
Disney, R and Gosling, A. (1998). 'Does it pay to work in the public sector? ' (1998)
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