Pensions and Late-Career Teacher Retention

Dongwoo Kim, Cory Koedel, Wei Kong (), Shawn Ni (), Michael Podgursky and Weiwei Wu ()
Additional contact information
Wei Kong: School of Business Shanghai University of International Business and Economics Shanghai, China 201620
Weiwei Wu: Department of Economics University of Missouri Columbia, MO 65211

Education Finance and Policy, 2021, vol. 16, issue 1, 42-65

Abstract: Public school teachers retire much earlier than comparable professionals. Pension rule changes affecting new teachers can be used to close this gap in the long run, but any effects will not be observed for decades and the implications for workforce quality are unclear. This paper considers targeted incentive policies designed to deter retirement among senior, experienced high-need science and math teachers, as a policy to staff classrooms with qualified teachers and improve workforce quality. We use structural estimates from a dynamic retirement model to simulate the workforce effects of targeted late-career salary bonuses and deferred retirement plans (DROPs) using administrative data from Missouri. Although both policies produce additional teaching years at relatively low costs, by forcing teachers to reveal work–retirement preferences, DROPs generally yield incremental teacher years at lower cost per year. More generally, this work highlights the utility of using structural retirement models to analyze fiscal and workforce effects of changes to public sector pension plans, since the effects of pension rule changes cumulate over many years.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp_a_00293 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Pensions and Late-Career Teacher Retention (2017)
Working Paper: Pensions and Late-Career Teacher Retention (2017)
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:tpr:edfpol:v:16:y:2021:i:1:p:42-65

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().