Browsing by Author "Tsao, Carolyn"

I study how three factors – working conditions, policy, and management – shape the supply of public school teachers in the U.S. Chapter 1 focuses on working conditions. I quantify the extent to which teachers earn rents, explicitly taking 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, and sum the gaps to obtain an estimate of the teaching rent. I find that teachers do not earn rents once working conditions are taken into account; instead, due to relatively poor teaching conditions, teaching pays a large premium that mostly functions as a compensating differential. Extending my point estimates to other states suggests that over $145 billion is being spent annually to compensate teachers for poor working conditions in the US, consistent with reports of teacher shortages today. Chapter 2, coauthored with Amy Kim, focuses on policy. We study the effects of legislation in teaching during the 1930s that protected married women from “marriage bars,” a form of employer discrimination that barred them from paid employment in most sectors in the early 20th century U.S. A difference-in-differences design shows that the prohibitions increased the share of married women teachers, partly by pushing unmarried women out of the labor force, and modestly increased women's labor force participation. Finally, Chapter 3 focuses on personnel management. To what extent do public school principals affect student outcomes, and how do teacher management practices differ between more and less effective principals? Using administrative data on teacher-principal-student links in two U.S. states, I estimate principal and teacher effectiveness using a two-way manager-worker fixed effect framework. I find principals explain less of the variation in student outcomes than teachers do. Importantly however, novel survey evidence suggests that effective principals use different management practices: under 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.