This paper employs a rich collection of survey and administrative datasets, including linked school-teacher payroll data, to document the reform of teacher compensation and school network implemented in Latvia amidst the economic crisis of 2008-2010, immediately after territorial reform. We...

The purpose of the present review is to summarize, and attempt to reconcile, the empirical research on the actual impact teachers unions have on American education. To give structure to that effort, this article analyses the unions' effectiveness in pursuing five of their key objectives: (1)...

Social or ethnic segregation can impede the equitable allocation of public resources in developing countries. We study an under-explored dimension; the allocation of public sector teachers in India. Using a register database for 2006-12, we construct indicators for the equality of teacher...

Many US workers receive a large portion of their lifetime compensation in the form of retirement pensions. How do changes in pensions vis à vis salaries affect labor supply and retirement? This paper examines the retirement responses to a reform that changed salaries and pensions of public...

This paper examines how the quality of a potential teacher's outside option affects who chooses to teach. I use variation in state level unemployment rates as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in the outside option available to first-year teachers in the NCES-SASS. I find that higher...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment, applying dynamic inverse probability weighting to account for dynamic selection. We show that the program is successful in increasing employment and reducing social assistance....

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. In this paper, we study how providing information to principals about teacher...

In politically competitive jurisdictions, there can be strong electoral incentives to underfund public pensions in order to keep current taxes low. I examine this hypothesis using panel data for 2,000 municipal pension plans from Pennsylvania. The results suggest that as a municipality becomes...

This research examines whether teacher licensure test scores and other teacher qualifications affect middle 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...

We evaluate a temporary public sector employment program targeted at individuals with weak labor market attachment in the City of Stockholm. Having access to rich high-quality individual-level administrative data, we apply dynamic inverse probability weighting, proposed by Van den Berg and...