Teacher Mobility Responses to Wage Changes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment
American Economic Review · 2011 · Volume 101 · Issue 3
Abstract
This paper utilizes a Norwegian experiment with exogenous wage changes to study teachers' turnover decisions. Within a completely centralized wage setting system, teachers in schools with a high degree of teacher vacancies in the past got a wage premium of about 10 percent during the period 1993-94 to 2002-03. The empirical strategy exploits that several schools switched status during the empirical period. In a fixed effects framework, I find that the wage premium reduces the probability of voluntary quits by six percentage points, which implies a short run labor supply elasticity of about 1 1/4 .
Keywords
State and Local Government: Health, Education, Welfare, Public Pensions, Analysis of Education, Wage Level and Structure, Wage Differentials, Public Sector Labor Markets, Geographic Labor Mobility, Immigrant Workers, Labor Turnover, Vacancies, Layoffs
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