This paper demonstrates that salaries and opportunity costs have important influences on how long teachers stay in teaching. The empirical work is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the careers of 7800 Michigan public school teachers. The generalized least squares...

Using data from two longitudinal surveys of American high school seniors, the authors show that basic cognitive skills had a larger impact on wages for twenty-four-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978. For women, the increase in the return to cognitive skills between 1978 and 1986...