Essays on the teacher labor market

This thesis presents three empirical essays on the teacher labor market. Chapter one exploits the exogenous variation in teacher pay arising from state-mandated pay increases to identify the causal effect of teacher pay on teacher qualifications. Results suggest that, while state-mandated increases do raise teacher pay, they lead in the short run to a reduction in teacher quality as measured by the selectivity of a teacher's undergraduate institution and the probability that math and science teachers majored in these fields. This result appears to be due to the fact that, in the wake of an across-the-board pay hike, newly hired teachers are of lower quality than incumbents. Chapter two estimates the impact of state-mandated pay raises on the likelihood of a teacher exiting the state public school system. To explore the effects on the quality of the teacher workforce, the analysis also investigates whether the responsiveness of the exit decision to the pay raise varies with the subject matter expertise of the teacher, as measured by the type of degree held. The findings suggest that general pay raises tend to increase the retention of experienced teachers, particularly at the secondary school level.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• McKie, Allison Nicole

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joshua Angrist and David H. Autor.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/39718

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/39718