IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cer/papers/wp630.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Do Higher Wages Produce Career Politicians? Evidence from Two Discontinuity Designs

Author

Listed:
  • Jan Palguta
  • Filip Pertold

Abstract

Wages paid to politicians affect both the selection of candidates into electoral races and the on-the-job performance incentives of incumbents. We differentiate between selection and incentive effects using two regression discontinuity designs based on: 1) population thresholds shifting politicians' wages and 2) electoral seat thresholds splitting candidates into those who narrowly won or lost. We find that higher wages do not increase the electoral incumbency advantage, suggesting that the incentive effect of higher wages does not impact re-election rates. We further show that higher wages motivate narrowly elected incumbents to run again much less often than past narrowly non-elected candidates.

Suggested Citation

  • Jan Palguta & Filip Pertold, 2018. "Do Higher Wages Produce Career Politicians? Evidence from Two Discontinuity Designs," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp630, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.
    • Handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp630
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp630.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Klara Svitakova & Michal Soltes, 2020. "Sorting of Candidates: Evidence from 20,000 Electoral Ballots," CERGE-EI Working Papers wp652, The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    re-election; political selection; electoral competition; wages; incumbency advantage; regression discontinuity design; municipal legislatures;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • M52 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Personnel Economics - - - Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • H57 - Public Economics - - National Government Expenditures and Related Policies - - - Procurement
    • H70 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cer:papers:wp630. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lucie Vasiljevova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eiacacz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.