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Teacher Labor Markets

Paper Session

Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2027 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (EST)

Marriott Marquis Washington DC
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Christopher Taber, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Beyond the Salary Schedule: How School Districts Use Teacher Pay Flexibility

Barbary Biasi
,
Yale University

Abstract

This paper provides new descriptive evidence on how public school districts use discretion over teacher compensation when they are not fully constrained by rigid salary schedules. I combine teacher-level payroll records with district salary schedules and AI-coded information from teacher contracts and employee handbooks to characterize how districts redesign pay along three margins: returns to credentials, salary placement of new hires, and wage growth for incumbent teachers. I then relate these choices to district characteristics, including size, student composition, fiscal conditions, teacher labor market conditions, and prior reliance on schedule-based pay.

Teacher Mobility and Inequality in School Effectiveness

Tim Ederer
,
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract

This paper documents how teacher mobility and career dynamics shape the distribution of teacher effectiveness across schools. I leverage comprehensive administrative data from Peru’s centralized teacher allocation system to track teachers’ movements across schools and estimate their value-added, allowing for teacher-student match effects and selection on unobserved match quality. I find that high value-added teachers are initially concentrated in more advantaged schools, while disadvantaged schools employ less effective teachers. Attrition and mobility further amplify these inequalities: teachers leaving disadvantaged schools are positively selected relative to stayers and tend to move to higher-performing schools, while the opposite holds in more advantaged schools. These flows do not generate clear efficiency gains through improved sorting on teachers' comparative advantages, suggesting that enhancing retention in disadvantaged schools should be an important policy objective for providing equal opportunities.

Compensation and the Choice to Teach: Evidence from a Survey of College Students

Chao Fu
,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jingnan Liu
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
Andrew Smith
,
Texas Higher Education Coordinating
Mathew Wiswall
,
New York University

Abstract

How to recruit and retain high-quality teachers—especially in disadvantaged communities—has long been a central challenge for U.S. public schools. A commonly used policy lever is teacher compensation. The effectiveness of such policies depends critically on the elasticity of individuals’ choices with respect to (i) majoring in education, (ii) entering the teaching profession, and (iii) teaching in disadvantaged communities, as well as on how these elasticities vary by individual ability. Given the lack of clean identifying variation in observational data, this paper surveys a sample of college students and elicits these elasticities from their choices under hypothetical counterfactual scenarios. Students' choices are quite elastic to wages. Among freshman respondents, a 25\% increase in teacher salaries would increase the fraction majoring in education from 8\% to 11\% and the fraction choosing the teaching profession from 9\% to 14\%; among senior respondents majoring in education, a 24\% increase in teacher salaries in high poverty schools would increase the fraction teaching in these schools from 41\% to 55\%. 
JEL Classifications
  • I2 - Education and Research Institutions
  • J4 - Particular Labor Markets