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The impact of public employment: evidence from Bonn

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  • Becker, Sascha O.
  • Heblich, Stephan
  • Sturm, Daniel

Abstract

This paper evaluates the impact of public employment on private sector activity using the relocation of the German federal government from Berlin to Bonn in the wake of the Second World War as a source of exogenous variation. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple economic geography model in which public sector employment in a city can crowd out private employment through higher wages and house prices, but also generates potential productivity and amenity spillovers. We find that relative to a control group of cities, Bonn experiences a substantial increase in public employment. However, this results in only modest increases in private sector employment with each additional public sector job destroying around 0.2 jobs in industries and creating just over one additional job in other parts of the private sector. We show how this finding can be explained by our model and provide several pieces of evidence for the mechanisms emphasised by the model

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  • Becker, Sascha O. & Heblich, Stephan & Sturm, Daniel, 2018. "The impact of public employment: evidence from Bonn," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 86576, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:86576
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    economic geography; public employment; place-based policies; German division;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F15 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Economic Integration
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-
    • R12 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - Size and Spatial Distributions of Regional Economic Activity; Interregional Trade (economic geography)

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