School district investments in general skills: The case of principal residency programs

Nguyen Minh, Rivkin Steven G., Sartain Lauren and Jeffrey Schiman
Additional contact information
Nguyen Minh: Ball State University
Rivkin Steven G.: University of Illinois at Chicago and NBER
Sartain Lauren: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and University of Chicago Consortium on School Research

IZA Journal of Labor Economics, 2022, vol. 12, issue 1, 29

Abstract: Districts are investing more in school leadership, including the implementation of residency training programs for aspiring principals. There is limited evidence about the district return on these investments, and none in the context in which principal hiring is decentralized at the school level. This paper develops a model highlighting the conditions under which districts benefit from investments in general leadership skills and examines the residency program in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS). The event-study analysis that addresses treatment effect heterogeneity finds that principals who complete a residency are significantly more effective at raising achievement. Although the leadership skills gained through the residency are likely to make a principal more valuable to districts outside of CPS, the large majority of residents remain in CPS despite the absence of salary premia for completion of a residency or high performance. These findings suggest the presence of transition costs that enable CPS to retain more effective, residency-trained principals without having to increase pay, thereby realizing some of the return on the investment in general skills.

Keywords: school principal training; principal labor markets; general skill investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 J45 M53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2478/izajole-2023-0001 (text/html)

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:vrs:izajle:v:12:y:2022:i:1:p:29:n:1

DOI: 10.2478/izajole-2023-0001

Access Statistics for this article

IZA Journal of Labor Economics is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc and Pamela Qendrai

More articles in IZA Journal of Labor Economics from Sciendo & Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit GmbH (IZA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().