Speaker: Aastha Rajan
Title: The Public Sector Advantage - Short and Long-Run Impacts of Government Employment
Abstract: This paper studies the role of public-sector employment in shaping economic mobility and racial inequality in the United States, focusing on Black workers. The public sector has historically provided relatively stable jobs, merit-based employment opportunities, and has served as a key occupational niche for Black workers in the presence of persistent discrimination in the private sector. This paper asks whether public-sector employment differentially improves outcomes for Black workers and whether it narrows racial gaps in both short-run and intergenerational outcomes. Estimating causal and intergenerational effects is complicated by non-random selection into sectors and limited data linking parents and children over time. To address these challenges, I construct a longitudinal dataset linking individuals and their children across decennial U.S. Censuses from 1900 to 1940. This framework enables explicit characterization of selection into public employment and allows for the estimation of both within-generation and intergenerational effects. The empirical strategy combines complementary approaches - a job-switcher design comparing workers transitioning from private to public employment with those switching within the private sector in similar local labor markets, and a household fixed-effects design comparing siblings who sort into different sectors. I also exploit variation in the timing of entry into public employment. The findings indicate that public-sector employment generates substantial economic gains for Black workers and contributes to improved outcomes for their children. These results highlight the public sector as an important channel for both contemporaneous and intergenerational mobility, with implications for re-evaluating ongoing reductions in public employment.
Maggie Hendrix
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