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Working Paper
What Kind of Teachers Are Schools Looking For? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
Teacher quality is a pressing public policy concern, yet there is little evidence on what types of teachers schools actually prefer to hire. This paper reports the results of an experiment that involved sending schools fictitious resumes with randomly-chosen characteristics in an attempt to determine what characteristics schools value when hiring new teachers. The results of the study suggest that an applicant?s academic background has little impact on the likelihood of success at private and charter schools, although public schools respond more favorably to candidates from more selective ...
Report
The Labor Market Effects of Occupational Licensing in the Public Sector
In the U.S., occupational licensing is more prevalent in the public sector than in the private sector, but the influence of occupational regulation for public sector workers has not been analyzed in detail. Our study initially examines the probability of a licensed worker selecting into the public sector. Using the probability as a control for these individuals’ risk aversion, we next examine how licensing impacts key labor market outcomes, such as wages, hours worked, and employment in the public sector. Our results show that having an occupational license increases the likelihood of ...
Working Paper
State Appropriations and Employment at Higher Education Institutions
his paper studies the impacts of state appropriations on staffing and salaries at public higher education institutions in the United States using employment and revenue data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, along with an instrumental variables strategy borrowed from Deming and Walters (2018) and Chakrabarti, Gorton, and Lovenheim (2020). The instrument sidesteps the potential endogeneity of state appropriations for a given institution in a given year by interacting an institution’s historical reliance on state appropriations with total state appropriations for all ...
Working Paper
Human Capital Dynamics and the U.S. Labor Market
The high U.S. unemployment rate after the Great Recession is usually considered to be a result of changes in factors influencing either the demand side or the supply side of the labor market. However, no matter what factors have caused the changes in the unemployment rate, these factors should have influenced workers' and firms' decisions. Therefore, it is important to take into account workers' endogenous responses to changes in various factors when seeking to understand how these factors affect the unemployment rate. To address this issue, we estimate a Mortensen-Pissarides style of ...
Working Paper
Local Labor Markets and Selection into the Teaching Profession
Using administrative data from Texas, I track individuals from high school through college to the workforce to determine the effects of local labor markets on occupational choice. I find local labor market conditions are countercyclical with selection into teaching and have a larger influence when experienced during high school. Individuals sorting into teaching because of poor local labor market conditions are of higher ability (standardized tests) and have higher productivity (value-added). The findings suggest that local labor market fluctuations shape career decisions well before ...