Job Market Paper
Who Leaves and Who Stays? The Impact of the Teacher Wage Gap on Teacher Quality
Abstract: To understand whether a widening of the teacher wage gap - the gap between teacher wages and wages offered in teachers’ outside options - leads to a decrease in the quality of education provision, this paper studies how exits of teachers from the teaching sector respond to the wage gap and how this response varies by teachers’ level of productivity. I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the wage gap caused by a 2014 French reform that significantly and uniformly increased wages for teachers in highly disadvantaged schools and only marginally increased wages in other disadvantaged schools. Using a difference-in-differences framework and robust estimates of the wage gap with outside options, identified from occupational transition matrices, I find that the probability of exit of teachers from the teaching sector drops for the average teacher when the wage gap narrows. The response is twice as strong for high-productivity teachers. In a simple framework of teachers labor market decisions, I use these elasticities to simulate how targeted or untargeted teacher bonuses would affect the aggregate quality of education provision.
Working Paper
Teacher Value-Added in the Absence of Annual Test Scores: Utilizing Teacher Networks
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel methodology for estimating teacher value-added in the presence of non-random teacher-student sorting and the absence of annual standardized student test scores. Rather than relying on lagged student test scores to control for nonrandom teacher-student sorting on student ability, I exploit within-student across-subject variation in test scores and teacher "networks" - teachers in the same subject who teach groups of students observed with a unique teacher in another subject. The resulting estimates closely recover the true parameters of teacher value-added in Monte Carlo simulations and align well with estimates from standard methodologies in New York City data where lagged test scores are available. The methodology substantially expands the research on teacher value-added, as the majority of educational settings do not rely on standardized testing in consecutive grade levels. I apply the method to French middle school teachers and find that a 1 SD increase in teacher value-added within school improves student scores by 0.10 SD in Math and 0.07 SD in French. I show that using a "hybrid" methodology - which augments the network estimator to control for lagged scores - in settings where lagged scores are available can outperform standard methods under specific sorting patterns by accounting for sorting on time-varying student unobservables.
Presentations: Toulouse School of Economics (2025), Columbia University (2024), IZA/ECONtribute Workshop on the Economics of Education (2023), CESifo / ifo Junior Workshop on the Economics of Education (2023), 38th meeting of the European Economic Association (2023), SSE Quality in Education Conference (2023), 18th Doctorissimes Conference (2023), European Association of Labour Economists (EALE) Conference (2023), PSE Applied Economics Seminar (2023), ENS Workshop in Economics of Education (2022), PSE Labour and Public Economics Seminar (2022).