Skills and selection into teaching: evidence from Latin America

Ricardo Estrada and Maria Lombardi

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper documents a novel stylized fact: many teachers in Latin America have low levels of cognitive skills. This fact is the result of both low levels of skills among the population and—in the case of numeracy—a gap between the average skill level of teachers and the rest of the tertiary-educated population (i.e., a teacher skills gap). To characterize the selection patterns behind this gap, we show that individuals with a teaching degree have lower average skills than individuals with other tertiary degrees, and that this gap is larger than the teacher skills gap. This difference is mainly explained by the selection into teaching of graduates from non-teaching degrees. Finally, we show evidence on one important determinant of the teacher skills gap: teacher relative wages are decreasing in skills.

Keywords: teacher quality; teacher salaries; teacher labor markets; Latin America (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2023-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam and nep-ure
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Published in Economía, 1, November, 2023, 22(1), pp. 218 – 239. ISSN: 1529-7470

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120906/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Skills and selection into teaching: Evidence from Latin America (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:120906

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