This study investigates the determinants and motives of professionals who change career to vocational teaching. The framework for this study is the Swiss vocational education system, which requires that teachers of vocational subjects must have a prior career in that specific field. Thus, to...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners’...

We examine whether and how teachers' major fields of study affect students' achievement, exploiting within-student variation across subfields in natural science (i.e., physics, chemistry, biology, and Earth science). Using middle-school students' data from the Trends in International Mathematics...

While it is widely established that higher wages attract more productive individuals into teaching, it is unclear if salaries can be used to motivate existing teachers to work harder, or more productively, in any way that affects pupil outcomes. Using teachers' predicted relative wages,...

This research examines whether teacher licensure test scores and other teacher qualifications affect high school student achievement. The results are based on longitudinal student-level data from Los Angeles. The achievement analysis uses a value-added approach that adjusts for both student and...

This is the first paper to estimate the effect of teacher strikes on student long-run educational attainment and labor market outcomes. We exploit cross-cohort variation in the prevalence of teacher strikes within and across provinces in Argentina in a difference-in-difference framework to...

Empirical research bears out the conventional wisdom that teacher quality is the key schooling resource influencing student achievement, so it is not surprising that policy makers attempt to influence it by regulating admission into the teacher labor market through licensure systems. Most of...