"Wages and the Search for Talent in the Public Sector: How Competitive are State Civil Service Systems?".

The women and men who staff public sector agencies throughout this nation are arguably the most important cog in the machinery that keeps the United States functioning. Logically, it is in the interest of public sector organizations to recruit the best and the brightest into their ranks, and in the ongoing war for talent, the ability to offer wage rates on par with those in the private sector remains a key component of fulfilling this goal.Although much has been written on the gaps in wages between the public and private sectors, the predominant focus of this line of research has been on federal wage rates. Those studies that have expanded their analysis to state and local government, by far the two largest sectors of government, have been lacking in that they tend to treat both in the aggregate, disregarding variation between states and localities. This paper takes a first step in addressing this gap in the literature. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Population Survey, I will provide disaggregated estimates of public/private wage gaps at the state government level from 1987 to 2002, for all fifty states. Preliminary results suggest that there is considerable variation in public/private wage gaps across the states, and that estimates shift dramatically when separated by gender. Additionally, I will provide an explanatory model of public/private wage gaps across the states with particular attention paid to the influence of state government unionization rates and state political ideology. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]