Some Economics of Teaching

Sherwin Rosen

Journal of Labor Economics, 1987, vol. 5, issue 4, 561-75

Abstract: Adam Smith's discussion of the payment of teachers is reviewed in terms of industrial organization and agency theory. The impli cit stu-dent fees necessary to support annual salaries average $1.30 per class meeting in primary and secondary schools and rise to $4.00 per lecture and up for college teachers. While salaries in teaching a re much smaller than in the large-scale visual media, implicit valuat ions per contact hour in teaching are at least six hundred times larg er than in television. Classroom teaching is expensive because a teac her's scale of operations is sharply constrained by the student-teach er ratio. Copyright 1987 by University of Chicago Press.

Date: 1987
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