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

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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.