We investigate the public-private wage differential in India using nationally representative
micro data. While the existing literature focuses on average wage differential, we study the
differences in the wage distributions. The raw wage differential between public and private
sector is positive across the entire distribution for both genders irrespective of area of
residence. A quantile regression based decomposition analysis reveals that the differences in
observed characteristics (covariate effect) account for only a small part of the wage
differential at lower quantiles, but a larger part at higher quantiles. At the very top of the
distribution, covariate effect account for a majority of the observed wage differential.