A Structural Approach to Assessing Retention Policies in Public Schools

Celia Vera

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 2019, vol. 19, issue 3, 26

Abstract: One out of five entering public school teachers leave the field within the first 4 years. Despite that the presence of a newborn child is the single most important determinant of exits of female teachers, retention policy recommendations rely on models that take children as predetermined. This article formulates and estimates a structural dynamic model that explicitly addresses the interdependence between fertility and labor force participation choices. The model with unobserved heterogeneity in preferences for children fits the data and produces reasonable forecasts of labor force attachment to the teaching sector. Structural estimates of the model are used to predict the effects that wage increases and reductions in the cost of childcare would have on female teachers’ employment and fertility choices. The estimates unpack important features of the interdependence of fertility and labor supply and contradict previous studies that did not consider the endogeneity between these two choices.

Keywords: teachers’ attrition; teachers’ retention; structural modeling; fertility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 J13 J44 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/bejeap-2018-0060 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:bejeap:v:19:y:2019:i:3:p:26:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/bejeap/html

DOI: 10.1515/bejeap-2018-0060

Access Statistics for this article

The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy is currently edited by Hendrik Jürges and Sandra Ludwig

More articles in The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().