A cross-sectional model of public safety wage determination: The case of police salaries across cities in the western United States

This dissertation develops a model of wage determination for public safety. A theoretical discussion of the expected effect of variables on police wages is followed by an empirical analysis. The emphasis is on the empirical study of the supply and demand for police services. This empirical work considers a comprehensive set of variables from relevant theory, and statistically analyzes the relationships among the variables and between the variables and actual salaries.From that analysis a smaller variables and distinctive set of variables are derived. The resulting model focuses on testing the effect of selected variables. The final models use few variables with expected signs and explain a high degree of the cross-sectional variation in wages.Designed to produce less costly estimation of the cost of living by using readily available sources of data, the model developed here can prove useful for predicting salaries in a cross sectional framework. The model is capable of generating factors important in explaining salary differences which could be used in arbitration.