 Task-specific experience and task-specific talent: Decomposing the productivity of high school teachersJason Cook and Richard Mansfield Journal of Public Economics, 2016, vol. 140, issue C, 51-72 Abstract: We use administrative panel data to decompose worker performance into components relating to general talent, task-specific talent, general experience, and task-specific experience. We consider the context of high school teachers, in which tasks consist of teaching particular subjects in particular tracks. Using the timing of changes in the subjects and difficulty levels to which teachers are assigned to provide identifying variation, we show that a substantial part of the productivity gains to teacher experience are actually subject-specific. Similarly, while three-quarters of the variance in the permanent component of productivity among teachers is portable across subjects and levels, there exist non-trivial subject-specific and level-specific components. Counterfactual simulations suggest that maximizing the test-score contribution of task-specific experience and task-specific talent can increase student performance by as much as .04 test score standard deviations relative to random assignment of teachers to classrooms. Keywords: Task-specific human capital; Teacher experience; Teacher value-added; Teacher quality (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:140:y:2016:i:c:p:51-72 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.04.001 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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