Medium-Run Consequences of Wisconsin's Act 10 : Teacher Pay and Employment

Wisconsin's Act 10 in 2011 gutted collective bargaining rights for public school teachers and mandated benefits cuts for most districts. We use various cross-state methods on school-district data from school years 2002-03 to 2015-16 to examine the act's immediate and medium-run net impacts on compensation and employment. We find that Act 10 coincided with ongoing significant benefit relative declines beyond the immediate benefit cuts. Controlling for funding level and composition reveals that Wisconsin school districts, unlike their control counterparts, have seen the number of teachers per student rise in the years since Act 10