Teacher Compensation and Structural Inequality: Evidence from Centralized Teacher School Choice in Perú

Abstract

This paper studies how increasing teacher compensation at hard-to-staff schools can reduce inequality in access to qualified teachers. Leveraging an unconditional change in the teacher compensation structure in Perú, we first show causal evidence that increasing salaries at less desirable locations attracts better quality applicants and improves student test scores. We then estimate a model of teacher preferences over local amenities, school characteristics, and wages using geocoded job postings and rich application data from the nationwide centralized teacher assignment system. Our estimated model suggests that the current policy is both inefficient and not large enough to effectively undo the inequality of initial conditions that hard-to-staff schools and their communities face. Counterfactual analyses that incorporate equilibrium sorting effects characterize alternative wage schedules and quantify the cost of reducing structural inequality in the allocation of teacher talent across schools.

Unexpected Colonial Returns: Self-Selection and Economic Integration of Migrants Over Multiple Generations

“…Differences in regional background are associated with differences in opportunities to invest in human capital as 'children born in remote and rural communities face disadvantages in achieving comparable levels of human capital as their peers born in urban areas' (World Bank 2018). These inter-regional disparities in opportunities are linked to past policies and historical inequities (Bobba et al 2021). The supply of (high quality) schools in remote areas in Suriname is more limited than in the capital city, and the distance to the capital city imposes higher costs of schooling.…”

Teacher Labor Market Equilibrium and Student Achievement

“…This paper fits in an emerging literature that uses teacher labor market equilibrium models to assess the gains in student achievement from various policies. These papers range in the allocation problem they consider from national (Combe, Tercieux and Terrier, Forthcoming;Bobba et al, 2021;Combe et al, 2021) to state cross-district (Biasi, Fu and Stromme, 2021) to local withindistrict (Boyd et al, 2013;Bates, 2020;Laverde et al, 2021) to sectoral (Tincani, 2021). Bau (Forthcoming) studies an equilibrium model of school competition with school-student match effects.…”

Teacher Labor Market Equilibrium and Student Achievement

“…Our paper fits in an emerging literature that uses teacher labor market equilibrium models to assess the gains in student achievement from various policies. These papers range in the allocation problem they consider from national (Combe, Tercieux and Terrier, Forthcoming;Bobba et al, 2021;Combe et al, 2021) to state cross-district (Biasi, Fu and Stromme, 2021) to local withindistrict (Boyd et al, 2013;Laverde et al, 2021) to sectoral (Tincani, 2021). 6 Our unique combination of detailed data on teacher applications, principal ratings, and student-teacher classroom assignments allows us to identify a two-sided heterogeneous preference and multi-dimensional production model with straightforward assumptions on behavior.…”