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  4. May 2011
  5. Teacher Mobility Responses to Wage Changes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment

American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Teacher Mobility Responses to Wage Changes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment

  • Torberg Falch
American Economic Review
vol. 101, no. 3, May 2011
(pp. 460–65)
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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 .

Citation

Falch, Torberg. 2011. "Teacher Mobility Responses to Wage Changes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment." American Economic Review, 101 (3): 460–65. DOI: 10.1257/aer.101.3.460

JEL Classification

  • H75 State and Local Government: Health; Education; Welfare; Public Pensions
  • I21 Analysis of Education
  • J31 Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
  • J45 Public Sector Labor Markets
  • J61 Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
  • J63 Labor Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs