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Police discretion has large potential consequences for public trust and safety; however, little is known about the extent of this discretion. I show that arrests critically depend on which officer responds to a 911 call; 1 standard deviation increase in officer arrest propensity raises arrest likelihood by 40%. High arrest officers are more likely to be white and have less experience. I find mixed evidence that arrest propensity is related to arrest quality. High arrest officers use force more often and make more low-level arrests, while they also have a higher share of low-level arrests that result in conviction.

Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment and using a difference-in-differences approach, we provide causal evidence on academics’ response to the update of a survey-based journal ranking. Focusing on business researchers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, we find that academics who are affected by the journal ranking shift their publication strategies, publishing relatively more in journals that have been upgraded than in journals that have retained their rank. More specifically, affected academics shift to journals that have been upgraded from B to A and less to those that have been upgraded from C to B. Younger and more actively publishing academics are more likely to react to journal upgrades. By identifying academics’ causal response to a journal ranking update, our study highlights the power of incentives in academia and allows us to derive important implications on the governance of higher education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study quantifies the drivers of the gender pay gap among medical doctors in the British public sector, both at the mean and across the earnings distribution. We make comparisons to private sector doctors, as well as to other public sector health professionals and find that the substantial 22% hourly gender pay gap among public sector doctors, which is predominately unexplained by personal and work-related characteristics, is far larger than in these comparator occupations. Our evidence suggests sector–occupation-specific drivers of gender pay inequality among public sector doctors, which are particularly pronounced at the top end of the wage distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Job satisfaction is sensitive to economic fluctuations; it rises during economic growth and falls in recessions. Job satisfaction also depends on relative comparisons. For workers less affected by business cycles-as is typical in the public sector-job satisfaction may thus be countercyclical due to comparisons with other sectors. Previous laboratory results confirm this countercyclical trend. This study reports new results from the German Socio-Economic Panel confirming the overall countercyclical job satisfaction trend but also revealing this trend is present only among men, not women. We consider three possible drivers of this gender gap. Competitiveness and pro-sociality differ between men and women both in the laboratory and in the field and plausibly interact with job satisfaction countercyclicality. Another potential explanation of countercyclicality is that men are more commonly the primary household providers. We conducted an experiment to explore these three channels. The experiment replicated the countercyclical job satisfaction trend. While identifying a significant gender gap in competitiveness, pro-sociality, and job satisfaction, we found no difference in job satisfaction cyclicality between men and women, nor a correlation with these traits. Our findings suggest that the fundamental gender differences we identified in the laboratory do not drive the gender differences observed in the survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of wage inequality concentrate on private wages. Public sector wages are typically assumed to contribute to the overall wage equality. We challenge this understanding in an analysis of the relative skill premium in the public versus private sectors. The analysis of heterogeneity across gender and geography is based on rich register data for Norway. The raw data confirm the relative wage compression in the public sector. However, this is a male phenomenon and only prevalent in large cities when unobserved worker and firm characteristics are taken into account. With identification based on shifters between private and public sectors and movers between city-size groups, wage setting for female workers in the public sector increases wage inequality in all regions, particularly in the periphery. The result is consistent with policies promoting the recruitment of high-educated female workers and the expansion of public services in the periphery counterbalancing the desired equality effect of public wages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reassesses the conventional wisdom that public-sector jobs have worse pay but better amenities than equivalent private-sector jobs, using data from 22 European countries and the USA. Earnings gaps are shown to be heterogeneous across countries—public sector work carries a premium in Europe but a penalty in the USA. However, whereas European public-sector workers report better job amenities—better job security and work–life balance—than their private-sector counterparts, there are no public–private amenity differentials for US workers. Public-sector work also has fewer pay-for-performance schemes. Finally, the public sector does not seem to ensure a fairer work environment, compared to the private sector, in terms of workplace discrimination and harassment. These stylized facts inform the external validity of extrapolating individual case studies to different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State and local employees comprise a significant proportion of the workforce and are largely covered by defined benefit pensions. Many of these retirement plans have been facing funding gaps, but legal restrictions often prevent them from reducing benefits for current employees. However, retirement plans can reduce liabilities by changing cost-of-living adjustments, or COLAs, which are commonly applied to benefits each year to allow retirees to maintain purchasing power in retirement. In this study, we examine the prevalence of COLAs in public sector retirement plans through original data collection for 49 plans in 30 states, which cover approximately 52% of public sector workers overall. Among these samples, on average 45% of workers each year experienced some change in COLAs between 2005 and 2018, with more than half of these workers experiencing negative changes. We consider stylized examples of public sector workers subject to reductions in COLAs to understand how COLAs may affect workers' retirement decisions. Our analysis suggests that eliminating a 3% COLA could delay retirement of affected workers by approximately 4.5 months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-random assignment of students to teachers can bias value added estimates of teachers' causal effects. Rothstein (2008a, b) shows that typical value added models indicate large counter-factual effects of 5th grade teachers on students' 4th grade learning, indicating that classroom assignments are far from random. This paper quantifies the resulting biases in estimates of 5th grade teachers' causal effects from several value added models, under varying assumptions about the assignment process. If assignments are assumed to depend only on observables, the most commonly used specifications are subject to important bias but other feasible specifications are nearly free of bias. I also consider the case where assignments depend on unobserved variables. I use the across-classroom variance of observables to calibrate several models of the sorting process. Results indicate that even the best feasible value added models may be substantially biased, with the magnitude of the bias depending on the amount of information available for use in classroom assignments.

Using a 40-year panel of public school teachers and principals in New York State, we explore how female principals affect rates of teacher turnover—an important determinant of school quality. We find that male teachers are about 12 percent more likely to leave their schools when they work under female principals than under male principals. In contrast, we find no such effects for female teachers. Furthermore, when male teachers request transfers, they are more likely to request schools with male principals. These results suggest that opposition from male subordinates could inhibit female progress in leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploiting variation from principal and teacher transitions over long administrative data panels from Missouri and Tennessee, we estimate the effects of principal race on the racial composition of a school's teachers. Evidence from the two states is strikingly similar. Principals increase the proportion of same-race teachers in the school by 1.9–2.3 percentage points, on average. Both increased hiring and increased retention of same-race teachers explain this compositional change. Further, leveraging longitudinal student-level data from Tennessee, we find that having a same-race principal improves math achievement, but this effect largely operates through avenues other than the racial composition of the teaching staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of teachers' unions on the stress that teachers experience in their schools. Relying on a nationally representative district-teacher matched dataset in pre-pandemic periods, we employ principal factor analysis to assess to teacher stress and use both contractual status and union membership to measure union strength. Based on multilevel linear model, we find that teachers' unions are negatively associated with teacher stress. We then exploit natural experiments that occurred in several U.S. states to identify the effect of legal and institutional changes weakening the strength of teachers' unions on teacher stress. Using the difference-in-difference estimation, we find that the new legislation in these states significantly increases teacher stress, and that the magnitudes of this negative impacts are greater for male, experienced, more qualified, and STEM-subject teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We investigate how promotion incentives affect the productivity of a large sample of high-skilled public employees: academics. In a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design, we exploit the three bibliometric thresholds of the 2012 National Scientific Qualification (NSQ), the centralized evaluation procedure regulating career advancements in Italian universities. We compare the 2013–16 research productivity of assistant professors barely qualified for associate professor—whose next goal becomes meeting the higher thresholds for the full professor qualification—with the productivity of candidates who barely miss the qualification—whose goal remains meeting the associate professor thresholds. We find that barely qualified scholars publish significantly more papers than their non-qualified colleagues, in journals of comparable quality. Our results emphasize the importance of promotion incentives as an effective incentivizing tool in public universities and more in general public organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I present results from a partial re-analysis of the Kenyan school tracking experiment first described in Duflo et. al (2011). My results suggest that, in a developing country school system with state-employed teachers, tracking can reduce short-run test scores of initially low-ability students with high learning potential. The highest scoring students subjected only to the tracking intervention scored well below comparable students in untracked classrooms at the end of the intervention. In contrast, students assigned to tracking under the experimental alternative teacher intervention experienced gains from tracking that increased across the outcome distribution. These alternative teachers were drawn from local areas, exhibited significantly higher effort levels and faced different incentives to produce learning. I conclude that although Pareto-improvements in test scores from tracking are possible, they are not guaranteed.

We analyze late-career teacher turnover induced by pension incentives. Using longitudinal data on Tennessee teachers, we find high-quality teachers less likely to retire conditional on age and experience. We estimate a structural model for retirement that allows high- and lower-quality teachers to have different work–retirement preferences and use it to simulate the effect of alternative pension plan designs. Enhancements to traditional plans accelerate teacher retirement and reduce average teacher quality, whereas defined contribution (DC) plans have the opposite effect. Under the current plan, targeted retention bonuses would delay retirement of high-quality teachers at relatively modest cost. [End Page 272] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the world is facing an unprecedented employment challenge due to the COVID-19 pandemic. International Labor Organization of the United Nations expects the largest amount of youth unemployment at the global level to take place in manufacturing, real estate, wholesale, and accommodation sectors. This paper has two objectives. The first is to introduce a graph-theoretic method for identifying upstream and downstream pathways of a targeted sector and characterize them in ways that help respond to and recovery from the adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The second is to apply this method in the context of China, Japan, India, Russia, Germany, Turkey, UK and USA, which together account for about 60 percent of the world GDP. Based on the analysis of most recent input–output data from 2015, manufacturing sector is found to be top priority sector to be targeted in all the eight countries, followed by real estate and wholesale sectors, and these sectors should be coupled with isolated communities of sectors to capture external employment and growth effects. Characterizing the critical pre-COVID-19 linkages of a targeted sector should inform policy makers regarding the design of employment and growth strategies to recover from the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging in paid employment after claiming retirement benefits may be an important avenue for individuals to work longer as life expectancies rise. After separating from one's career employer, individuals may engage in paid work to stay active or to supplement their current level of retirement savings or both. Individuals who choose not to work after claiming may be expressing their preference to stay retired, perhaps because their retirement income is sufficient. However, the decision to work after claiming may be driven by the lack of retirement planning and insufficient savings, while the lack of post-claiming work may reflect the inability to find adequate employment opportunities. We use administrative records merged with panel data from several surveys of public employees in North Carolina to study the decision to engage in paid work after claiming retirement benefits. More than 60% of active workers plan to work after claiming benefits, while only around 42% of the same sample of individuals have engaged in post-claiming paid work in the first few years after leaving public sector employment. Despite this gap, stated work plans are strongly predictive of actual post-claiming work behavior. Our final analysis uses self-reported measures to gauge the financial well-being of our sample in the early years after leaving career employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning literature has documented the influence of adjunct instructors on student subsequent interest and success, but very little is known about the underlying mechanisms. This study investigates instructor choice of grading standards as one mediating channel by exploiting a unique university policy that converts full-time permanent lecturers from existing pool of parttime temporary instructors. We find that instructors hired on a temporary, part-time basis assign higher grades than their permanent full-time counterparts, with no discernible differences in student learning outcomes or perceived teaching effectiveness. The differential grading standards, however, appear to have a nonnegligible impact on student enrollment patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On average, secondary school students in the United States are absent from school three weeks per year. For this study, we are able to link middle and high school teachers to the class-attendance of students in their classrooms and create measures of teachers' contributions to student class-attendance. We find systematic variation in teacher effectiveness at reducing unexcused class absences. These differences across teachers are as stable as those for student achievement, but teacher effectiveness on attendance only weakly correlates with their effects on achievement. A high value-added to attendance teacher has a stronger impact on students' likelihood of finishing high school than does a high value-added to achievement teacher. Moreover, high value-added to attendance teachers can motivate students to pursue higher academic goals. These positive effects are particularly salient for low-achieving and low-attendance students. [End Page 343] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public sector hires disproportionately more educated workers. To rationalize this finding, we propose a model with a perfectly competitive private sector, and non-Walrasian public sector. Our economy also features heterogeneity across individuals and jobs, and a simple sorting mechanism that generates underemployment - educated workers performing unskilled jobs. We find that the public-sector wage differential and excess underemployment account for 15 percent of the education bias, with the remaining accounted for by technology. In a counterintuitive fashion, we find that more compressed wages in the public sector raise inequality in the private sector.

The Navy’s promotion-retention process involves two successive decisions: The Navy decides whether an individual is selected for promotion, and then, conditional on the Navy’s decision, the sailor decides whether to reenlist or leave the Navy. Rates of promotion and retention depend on individuals’ demographic and other characteristics, wars and economic conditions and factors that the Navy policy makers can control. Using estimates of these decision-making processes, we examine two important public policy questions: Do Navy promotion and retention rates differ across race and sex? Can the Navy alter its promotion and other policies to better retain sailors, or do war and civilian labor market conditions determine retention?

This study examines the distribution options of 85 large public retirement plans covering general state employees, teachers, and local government employees. The interest rates used to price annuities vary considerably across the plans. As a result, retirees with the same monthly benefit if a single life benefit is chosen will have substantially different monthly benefits if they select a joint and survivor annuity. We examine the impact of variation in the pricing of annuity options using both cross-plan differences in interest rates and the change in the choice of annuity options in one plan after the price of options changes due to new assumed interest rates and mortality rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between countries' regulatory environment, as measured through business, credit, labor and trade regulations, and the wage premium or penalty associated with self-employment over the period of 1970 to 2011. When considering all self-employed workers, there is no evidence that labor market regulations are associated with overall earnings penalties or premiums. However, stricter business regulations and bureaucratic red tape that restrict starting, operating, or closing a business are associated with increased earnings penalties for non-professional own-account self-employed workers, as well as premiums for employers and own-account professionals. Both more regulated trade and increased credit availability are correlated with increased earnings penalties for all self-employed workers. The association is consistently larger and more robust for female self-employed workers compared to men. These findings are consistent with regulatory restrictions on business entry and access discouraging more productive workers, particularly women, from entering non-professional own-account self-employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]