The Labor Market and School Finance Effects of the Texas Shale Boom on Teacher Quality and Student Achievement

Joseph Marchand and Jeremy Weber

No 2015-15, Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics

Abstract: Resource booms can affect student achievement through greater labor demand, where rising wages pull students or teachers out of schools, and through an expanded tax base, where increased school spending alters teacher quality or student productivity. Using shale depth variation across Texas school districts with annual oil and gas price variation, this study finds that resource development slightly decreased student achievement despite providing schools with more money. Vocational and economically disadvantaged students were pulled into the labor market, while teacher turnover and inexperience increased. Schools responded to the tax base expansion by spending more on capital projects but not on teachers.

Keywords: local labor markets; local school finance; resource booms; teacher quality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H70 I22 J24 J40 Q33 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 49 pages
Date: 2015-09-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sites.ualberta.ca/~econwps/2015/wp2015-15.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:albaec:2015_015

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Alberta, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joseph Marchand ().