This dissertation examines three labor market issues regarding public school
administrators in Texas using personnel records from the 1994-95 school year until
the 2003-04 school year. The first essay explores promotion rates of men and women
to school principal, a position that requires certification. I find ignoring gender differences in desire for promotion yields results similar to the existing literature: men
hold an advantage in the promotion process. However, restricting the analysis to only
those individuals who have expressed interest in an administrative position, those who
became trained and certified as a principal, I find men and women face no statistically
significant difference in the probability of promotion. Duration analysis shows that
although men are most often promoted four years after they become certified and
women are most often promoted six to seven years after becoming certified, women
face a much higher hazard of promotion than men. This cannot be explained by a
higher exit rate from the education sector by men.
The second essay examines the effect of restrictive licensing on the quality of
the entrants into a profession. Theory suggests that requiring minimum competency
standards truncates the low end of the quality distribution, however, increased costs
of entry encourage talented potential entrants to pursue outside opportunities. Using
the public school principal profession in Texas and measuring teacher quality by changes in student achievement, I find evidence that lower entry costs increase the
quality of entrants. As a robustness check, I categorize observations geographically
into control and treatment groups to ensure the estimated effect is a result of reduced
entry costs and not unobserved factors.
The third essay examines the effect of increased school choice on the earnings
and abilities of school administrators. I find an overall positive effect of competition
on administrators' earnings suggesting that productivity gains from hiring talented
managers outweigh the pressure to reduce costs by cutting salaries. However, the
results are sensitive to the level of competition, the type of labor market, and the
administrators' position. I control for possible endogeneity both mechanically and
with outside instruments and my conclusions are largely unchanged.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1679 |
| Date | 15 May 2009 |
| Creators | Mitchem, Eric John |
| Contributors | Deere, Donald, Ureta, Manuelita |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Dissertation, text |
| Format | electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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