Job Market Paper

Protecting the Rainbows: Teacher Retention and Employment Anti-Discrimination Policies in the U.S.

This paper will be presented at,

• PAA annual meeting, Columbus Ohio, 2024

• APPAM Conference, Atlanta, GA, 2023

• SEA 93rd annual meeting, New Orleans, LA, 2023

• Carolina Region Empirical Economics Day (CREED), Columbia, SC, 2023

Highlights

• This study explores the impact of anti-discrimination policies on teacher retention and job satisfaction, shedding light on their crucial role in fostering diversity and inclusion within education systems, benefiting both society and students.

• Key questions addressed:

  • Do these policies influence teacher retention?

  • How do they influence teacher satisfaction?

  • Do they affect novice and experienced teachers differently?

  • What are the variations across public and private schools, gender, race, and age of teachers?

• I utilize nationally representative data, combining teacher-level information from seven waves of SASS surveys (1987-2011) with state-level LGBT employment anti-discrimination policy data.

• Employing a robust statistical approach, I find that policies protecting employees of all sectors (SOA) reduce the likelihood of teachers moving by 4.5 percentage points, potentially retaining 135,000 teachers in the U.S. This effect primarily stems from teachers opting to transfer to another career rather than switching schools.

• Effect of SO > Effect of GI -- Potentially because of

  • Different social tolerance towards LGB people compared to Transgender people​

  • Diminishing effect of different policies

• Policies protecting only state employees (SOS) do not yield significant effects on teacher retention.(Probably two reverse mechanisms: marginal discriminator vs diversity advocates) 

• Gender identity-based policies reduce teacher mobility by 2 percentage points, with potential implications for 60,000 teachers. The impact is more pronounces on those switching schools.

• Satisfaction increases in states enforcing sexual orientation-based and gender identity-based policies, but not in states with policies limited to state employees.

• Novice teachers experience more substantial effects from these policies compared to seasoned ones, especially regarding sexual orientation-based policies.

• Policy effects vary by gender, race, and age: SOA affects female teachers, while SOS has implications for male teachers. Non-white teachers benefit more from these policies.

• SOA reduces mobility across age groups, with a stronger effect on younger teachers.

• Limitations include the absence of data on teachers’ sexual orientation and gender identity, limited temporal data on societal tolerance towards LGBT people, and the lack of information about unhired individuals. However, these findings offer valuable insights into teacher retention and the impact of anti-discrimination policies.

• Implications and Implementations:

  • Expansion of anti-discrimination policies is suggested​

  • Targeted support (female, novice, non-white) and awareness campaigns toward diversity are recommended. 

  • In-depth research to identify the areas of conflict or alignment is needed. 

  • The results extend to current socio-political issues with targeted policies. 

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The Effect of District Salary Structure on Teacher Turnover in South Carolina

Working paper (Under review), with Tran, H. and Smith, D.

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand the relationship between district’s salary structure and teacher turnover, using South Carolina as a focal state. Specifically, we ask 1) do districts that frontload their salary schedule experience higher teacher turnover, and 2) how does teacher experience influence the relationship between district salary structure and teacher turnover?The study employs an omnibus assessment of the relationship between the districts’ overall teacher turnover with both a) a dummy capturing whether districts frontload and b) how much the districts’ premium is higher for beginning teachers in frontloading districts. To analyze if a frontloading salary structure affects teacher turnover, the study uses a difference-in-differences method relying on the district decisions to between two types of salary structures: frontloading, where salaries are higher at the beginning of a teacher’s career, and backloading, where salaries increase more substantially later in the career. For a more detailed and rigorous investigation, we also apply quantile regression to our analyses.The findings suggest that districts offering higher frontloading premiums tend to experience lower average teacher turnover. Additional results suggest that higher frontloading premiums benefit the retention of novice teachers, although this effect is not statistically significant for the turnover of seasoned teachers. Given that the impact of teacher salary structure on teacher turnover remains understudied and underutilized, this original research seeks to help district administrators better understand the complex relationship between a district’s salary structure and turnover of both novice and veteran teachers.

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Kept at the Margins: Why Do Rural Teacher Staffing Challenges Exist? Why Do They Persist?

Working paper (Under review), with Tran, H. and Smith, D.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to show how rural teacher staffing challenges are systemically perpetuated by both geographic factors and systemic underinvestment in rural schools. The study is focused on a case from South Carolina's most rural and impoverished districts involved in the "Abbeville vs. South Carolina" school funding lawsuit. Initiated in 1993, the Abbeville lawsuit aimed to redress school funding equity and adequacy. These districts secured a partial court victory in 2005 and another in 2014. Yet, by 2017, the lawsuit was dismissed. Critics decry the sustained underfunding and systemic disadvantages for these districts, while the state emphasizes the many improvements since the lawsuit's start. We aim to understand staffing challenges in rural contexts through interviews with district leadership, teachers, and principals (n=17). The study examines the role of rural school funding underinvestment in perpetuating these challenges using an event study of funding changes after the only financial ruling for the plaintiff districts in the lawsuit. Then, we investigate the impact and effectiveness of state interventions against the backdrop of continued underinvestment utilizing the Rural Recruitment Initiatives (RRI) program. The results of the event study of the effect of court case on narrowing the revenue gap between the plaintiff and non-plaintiff districts indicate that plaintiff districts have consistently statistically and practically significantly lower revenue than their non-plaintiff counterparts, with this effect increasing over time. We also show that an additional $10,000 disbursement is associated with 0.06% less teacher turnover in the eligible districts. In an average district with over $109,000 disbursement, the turnover decreases by 0.65% (about 2.9 teachers in an average district with 445 teachers). In short, our study addresses why the problem of rural teacher shortages exists and why the problem persists. 

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How Two Giant Marketplace Lenders Shape Banks' Unsecured Personal Loan Prices!

Working Paper, with Mahyar Ebrahimitorki

This paper presented at 

• SEA 92nd annual meeting, Fort Lauderdale, FL, 2022

• WEAI 98th annual conference, San Diego, CA, 2023 (Online)

The behavior of participants in a market is considerably affected by new firm entries and the introduction of new (and sometimes differentiated) products. In this paper, we examine how encroaching marketplace (MP) lenders would impact the traditional banks' loan pricing in the unsecured consumer loan market. Filling this void in the literature is important because low-cost financing of individual expenditures by MP lenders can contribute to stimulating consumption from households and affect the real economy. A difference in differences (DID) model with an endogenous entry is used to elucidate the main goal of this study. To address the endogeneity of entry, I define two instrumental variables (IV) and estimate an IV-DID model. According to the increased demand scenario and “service agglomeration”, heterogeneous lending firms cause an increasing pricing response to the entry. Additionally, banks, distinguished by their sizes, have heterogenous pricing responses to the entry.

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Work in Progress

• The Effect of Performance Bonuses Paid to the Teachers on the Teacher Turnover and Student Outcomes

• Money or Love: Student Loans and Post-Graduation Work Outcomes

• Finacial Literacy and Job Choices

• Discrimination perception across careers 

• How two giant FinTech lenders shape banks' unsecured personal loan prices!

• Are borrowers happier while FinTech lenders break the “Tyranny of Distance”?