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Title: Is Rising Non-Teacher Pay to Blame for Falling Teacher Quality? Lessons from the Introduction of the Birth Control Pill
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: The average quality of teachers declined precipitously between 1960 and 2000, coinciding with a decline in the ratio of pay in teaching as compared to pay in alternative professions: relative pay. The effect of relative pay on the quality of teachers is difficult to measure because teacher pay may be correlated with working conditions, such as the school's neighborhood quality, student behaviors, and other challenges associated with the work environment. To address this concern I exploit state-by-cohort variation in whether women had legal access to the birth control pill in young adulthood. Previous work has shown that young adult pill access improved early career investments by enabling better control of childbirth timing, producing landmark improvements in the alternative professional pay available to high-ability women. This lowered the effective relative teacher pay for high-ability women. I therefore use a measure of young adult pill access as an instrument for relative pay. This instrumental variables approach assumes that the pill rollout is random with respect to state-by-cohort variation in working conditions, thus producing unbiased estimates of the effect of relative pay on the propensity to teach among women who entered the labor market between 1960 and 1975. The primary results indicate that a 10 percent increase in relative pay increases the likelihood of choosing to teach by 5 percentage points. In addition, my results show no significant differences in the labor supply elasticity to teaching by ability suggesting that high-ability women are about equally responsive to relative pay as low-ability women. In culmination, the results reveal that the opportunity cost to teaching produces a significant effect on the average quality of U.S. teachers.
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Authors: Hamilton Hester, Candace
Publisher: UC - Berkeley
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure
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