Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Who Leaves Teaching After Childbirth? An Analysis of Teacher Retention and Teacher Quality

这一研究项目将利用来自北卡罗来纳州的大量数据集和创新的经济方法，研究生育是否导致女教师流失，以及这是否导致教师质量下降。 教师素质是影响学生成功的最重要的学校相关投入之一。 该项目将通过构建一个新的数据集来解决这个问题，该数据集将行政出生记录，教师就业记录和学生学校记录联系起来。该项目将比较生育前后男女教师的就业途径，以了解生育对男女就业的不同影响。此外，它将调查这种类型的流失教师质量的差异，以了解是否分娩是高质量的教师辍学点。教师素质是影响学生成功的最重要的学校相关投入之一。 鉴于生育是美国许多妇女劳动力的一个众所周知的消耗点，而教学是一个以女性为主的职业，目前尚不清楚这是否是高质量教师流失的时期。 本研究的结果对留住教师、提高教师质量、改善教育成果等政策具有重要意义。本研究采用性别区分的事件研究回归法，追踪生育前后的教师就业情况，比较男女教师的模式，并调查教师对学生成绩的"附加值"的异质性，如通过认知结果如学生考试成绩和非认知结果如学生出勤率来衡量。该项目从三个方面促进现有的识字率。首先，新的数据集构建克服了现有数据的诸多局限性，例如样本量小以及生育率和就业信息有限。第二，该项目通过侧重于一个既有趣又有绝大多数雇员为妇女的具体职业，为劳动力市场对母亲的惩罚的文献做出了贡献 第三，有关风险离开分娩周围的专业教师的有效性提供了第一个描述性的证据，是否分娩是一个促成因素的损失，高质量的教师从专业。这项研究可以为美国正在进行的关于提供家庭友好型劳动力市场政策（如带薪家庭假）的辩论提供信息，这已被证明可以增加妇女的就业和保留到他们的前-该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识产权进行评估，被认为值得支持。优点和更广泛的影响审查标准。

This research project will use a large data set from the state of North Carolina and innovative economic methods to study whether childbirths induce loss of female teachers and if this leads to a reduction in the quality of teachers. Teacher quality is one of the most important school-related inputs influencing student success. This project will do this by constructing a novel dataset linking administrative birth records, teacher employment records, and student school records to answer this question. This project will compare the paths of employment for men and women in teaching around the time of childbirth to understand the differential impacts of childbirth on employment by gender. Additionally, it will investigate differences in this type of attrition by teacher quality in order to understand whether childbirth is a point of high quality teacher dropout. Teacher quality is one of the most important school-related inputs influencing student success. Given that childbirth is a well-known point of attrition from the labor force for many women in the U.S. and teaching is a female-dominated profession, it is not clear whether this is the period when high quality teachers are lost to the profession. The results of this research has important implications for policies to retain teachers, improve teacher quality, and improve educational outcomes.This project employs gender-specific event-study regressions to track employment in teaching around childbirth, compare the patterns for male and female teachers, and investigate heterogeneity by teachers’ “value-added” to student achievement, as measured by cognitive outcomes such as student test scores and non-cognitive outcomes such as student attendance. This project contributes to the existing literate in three ways. First, the novel dataset construction overcomes a multitude of limitations in existing data, such as small sample size and limited information on fertility and employment. Second, the project contributes to the literature on labor market penalty of motherhood by focusing on one specific profession that is both an interesting case study and has an overwhelming proportion of employees as women Third, relating the risk of leaving the profession around childbirth to teacher effectiveness provides the first descriptive evidence of whether childbirth is a contributing factor to the loss of high quality teachers from the profession. This research can inform the ongoing debate in the U.S. on the provision of family-friendly labor market policies such as paid family leave, which has been shown to increase women’s employment and retention to their pre-birth employer but is still not available to most individuals in the U.S. labor marketThis award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.