Local Public Sector Wages, the Local Fiscal Environment, andTheir Effects on Land Values

过去三十年见证了公共部门劳动力市场的巨大变化。自20世纪50年代以来，当地公共部门的规模迅速扩大，工会化程度也越来越高。这种转变促使了对当地公共劳动力市场的大量研究，强调工会对公共部门就业、工资和生产率的影响。许多这类研究的一个缺点是它们没有充分认识到公共部门的薪酬是在地方预算过程的更广泛背景下确定的。因此，当地经济状况，特别是财政环境，对公共工资的全部影响没有得到充分把握。有助于影响当地公共工资水平和模式的潜在重要的城市特有特征在以前的工资/收入规格中被省略。该项目的贡献来自于根据各种数据重新估计地方公共工资方程，以及对被忽视的地方财政变量的重要性进行测试。这些变量包括社区向公共工作人员“支付”工资溢价的能力，以及当地工人“议价能力”的衡量指标，即他们占用当地租金的能力。此外，该项目还调查了衡量的当地公共工资差异在多大程度上反映在社区较低的土地价格上。

The last thirty years have witnessed dramatic changes in public sector labor markets. Since the 1950's, the local public sector has grown rapidly in size and become increasingly unionized. This transformation has prompted considerable research on local public labor markets emphasizing the impact that unions have had on employment, wages, and productivity in the public sector. A shortcoming of many of these studies is their failure to adequately recognize that public sector compensation is set within a broader context of a local budgetary process. As a result, the full influence of local economic conditions, the fiscal environment in particular, on public wages has not been captured. Potentially important city-specific traits helping influence the level and pattern of local public wages have been omitted from previous wage/earnings specifications. The contribution of this project comes from reestimating local public wage equations on a variety of data and from testing for the importance of the neglected local fiscal variables. These variables include proxies for the community's "ability to pay" wage premia to public workers and measures of the "bargaining power" of the local workers, i.e., their ability to appropriate local rents. In addition, the project investigates the degree to which measured local public wage differentials are reflected in lower land prices in the communities.