Governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints. Given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment, the government wage bill has come under increased scrutinty. The central question is: How do government wages compare with those in the private sector? In this paper we develop and estimate a model to answer this question. An important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice. The estimation results (FIML) sound a strong warning against the use of OLS estimates that are based on sector-specific samples. Data are from Cote d'Ivoire.