Whether or not value-added models should control for contemporaneous student absences is theoretically ambiguous, as such absences are only partly outside of teachers' control. Teachers often feel strongly that value-added models should account for student attendance, and many districts'...

Representative bureaucracy theory is central to public administration scholarship due to the likely relationship between the demographic composition of the public workforce and both the actual and perceived performance of public organizations. Primary school classrooms provide an ideal context...

While it is commonly perceived that teachers take more absences than other professionals, few empirical studies have systematically examined the level and distributions of teacher absences in the US. Using the Monthly Current Population Survey between the 1995 and 2019 school years, I document...

Rates of employee absences and the effects of absences on productivity are topics of conversation in many organizations in many countries. One reason is that high rates of employee absence may signal weak management and poor labor-management relations. A second reason is that reducing rates of...

This paper examines the widespread perception in India that the country has an acute teacher shortage of about one million teachers in public elementary schools, a view repeated in India's National Education Policy 2020. Using official DISE data, we show that there is hardly any net teacher...