Altruistic and Status Minded Public Workers: Evidence of the Influence of Government Effectiveness

We empirically explore whether workers in the public sector are more intrinsically motivated by altruism and status concerns than their private counterparts and look for the influence of an effective government. We base our findings on a large scale survey conducted in 51 countries. We use logistic regression to estimate the influence on the odds of working in the public sector. We find that altruistic workers are strongly attracted to the public sector and even more so to an effective government. The effects of status concerns seem ambiguous. However, we do find that highly status minded employees avoid a very effective government. We find that these effects are stronger for higher levels of altruism and status concerns. Keywords: