“…The existence, in general, of a lower wage dispersion in the public sector implies, in turn, that the analysis of the average wage differential provides an incomplete view of the different processes of wage determination in the public and private sectors. This has led several authors to examine inter-sector wage differentials across the wage distribution using decomposition techniques of differences in wage distributions (Poterba and Rueben, 1994, Melly, 2005a, Christopoulou and Monastiriotis, 2013, Cai and Liu, 2011, Lucifora and Meurs, 2006and Depalo et al, 2013. Their results largely coincide, confirming that, in general, the role of the characteristics varies at specific points in the wage distribution, so that the public sector wage premium is greater in the lower part of the distribution and becomes smaller in the higher quantiles, so as to at a given point the premium usually becomes negative.…”