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

本研究项目将使用来自北卡罗来纳州的大型数据集和创新的经济方法来研究生育是否会导致女教师的流失，以及这是否会导致教师质量的下降。教师素质是影响学生成功的最重要的学校相关投入之一。这个项目将通过构建一个新的数据集来解决这个问题，该数据集连接了行政出生记录、教师就业记录和学生学校记录。该项目将比较男性和女性在分娩前后的就业路径，以了解分娩对性别就业的不同影响。此外，它将调查教师质量在这类流失中的差异，以了解分娩是否是高质量教师辍学的一个点。教师素质是影响学生成功的最重要的学校相关投入之一。众所周知，对于美国的许多女性来说，生育是劳动力流失的一个原因，而教师又是一个以女性为主的职业，目前尚不清楚这是否是高素质教师流失的时期。本研究的结果对保留教师、提高教师素质和改善教育成果的政策具有重要意义。本项目采用针对性别的事件研究回归来跟踪分娩前后的教学就业情况，比较男女教师的模式，并通过教师对学生成绩的“增值”（以学生考试成绩等认知结果和出勤率等非认知结果衡量）来调查异质性。这个项目在三个方面对现有的文化做出了贡献。首先，新的数据集构建克服了现有数据的诸多限制，如样本量小、生育和就业信息有限。其次，该项目通过关注一个既有趣又女性员工占绝大多数的特定职业，为劳动力市场对母亲的惩罚做出了贡献。第三，将分娩期间离开该职业的风险与教师效率联系起来，提供了第一个描述性证据，证明分娩是否是导致该职业中高素质教师流失的一个因素。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的辩论提供信息，例如带薪家庭假，这已经被证明可以增加女性的就业和保留她们在出生前的雇主，但在美国劳动力市场上，大多数人仍然无法获得该奖项。该奖项反映了国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.