Working Papers

It's Not (Just) About the Money: Pay and the Value of Working Conditions in Teaching

This paper quantifies the extent to which teachers earn rents, using a new approach that explicitly takes both pay and non-wage job attributes into account. Using quasi-experimental designs, novel administrative data, and a choice experiment, I estimate the gap in pay and the gap in the value of working conditions between teaching and teachers' next-best jobs, which sum to the teaching rent. Employing variation in who enters and exits teaching induced by cutoff scores in the teacher certification process and shocks to school staffing, I show that teaching pays a premium of around $20,000 per year (33-40% of the teaching salary) more than teachers' next-best options. Importantly however, I also find that teachers value the working conditions in their next-best jobs more than the conditions in teaching, implying much of the pay premium is a compensating differential. Inexperienced teachers, who report the most difficult teaching conditions, are willing to pay the most for better conditions. My results indicate that teachers earn a large pay premium that is significantly offset by the job's relatively undesirable conditions, resulting in a moderate 16% rent for experienced teachers and no rent for inexperienced teachers.

Awards: Best Paper Award at the CESifo Economics of Education Conference 2024

The Effects of Prohibiting Marriage Bars: The Case of U.S. Teachers

with Amy Kim

Conditional Accept (The Journal of Economic History)

Married women in the early 20th century U.S. faced "marriage bars," a form of employer discrimination that barred them from paid employment. However, because the end of marriage bar use coincided with shifting social norms and labor market conditions, it is unclear how the end of marriage bars affected women’s employment. We study the effects of the legislative prohibition of marriage bars in teaching during the 1930s. A difference-in-differences design shows that the prohibitions increased the share of married women teachers by 3.5 p.p. (20%), partly by pushing unmarried women out of teaching, thus increasing women's labor force participation.

Awards: 2024 IPUMS USA Research Award

Managers in Public Schools

To what extent do public school principals affect student outcomes, and how do management practices differ between more and less effectiveness principals? Using administrative data on teacher-principal-student links in two US states, I estimate principal and teacher effectiveness using a two-way manager-worker fixed effect framework. Variance decompositions show that principal effectiveness explains less of the variance in student outcomes than teacher effectiveness does.  That said, switching to a more effective principal improves school outcomes: event studies around principal moves and retirements show that receiving a more effective principal improves student outcomes (increased test scores, decreased absenteeism) and teacher outcomes (greater teacher retention, increased student test scores within teacher). Importantly, novel survey evidence suggests that principal effectiveness is attributable to particular management practices: linking the estimated principal effects to survey data on teachers' perceptions of their school leadership, I find that at schools that employ more effective principals, teachers are more likely to report the use of data-driven instructional practices but also a lack of trust and mutual respect between administration and staff. 

Work in Progress

Feedback Style and Worker Productivity

with Calvin Jahnke and Gabor Nyeki

This paper studies how a manager's tone when giving feedback to workers affects individual productivity and output quality. We construct a novel panel dataset that links software engineers and managers to their email communications and code contributions on the largest open source software project, the Linux kernel. To identify tones used in the emails (e.g., toxic, polite, encouraging), we use natural language processing and machine learning techniques. Additionally, to control for the informativeness of feedback, we fine-tune a large language model (GPT-2) and use the token probabilities it generates to construct measures of entropy and surprisal. We find a strong negative relationship between manager toxicity and engineer productivity. Using an instrumental variables design to address endogeneity in a manager's choice of tone, we find that receiving toxic feedback from a manager reduces the likelihood that an engineer completes a programming task, increases the amount of time to task completion, and decreases the likelihood that an engineer completes more tasks in the next 30 days.