Volume 25, Number 1 (Winter) 1990
Murnane, Richard J. and Randy Olsen. 1990. "The Effects of Salaries and Opportunity Costs on Length of Stay in Teaching: Evidence from North Carolina." Journal of Human Resources 25(1):106-124.
This paper shows that teachers who are paid more stay longer in teaching, that teachers with high opportunity costs, as measured by test scores and subject specialties, stay in teaching less long than other teachers do, and that salaries influence duration less for teachers with high test scores than for teachers with lower scores. The research is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the career histories of 13,890 North Carolina teachers. The empirical work uses a generalized least squares estimation technique that accommodates censored observations, time-varying covariates, and fixed effects.
Richard J. Murnane is a professor in the Graduate School of education at Harvard University; Randall J. Olsen is a professor of economics at Ohio State University. The research on which this paper is based was supported by the National Science Foundation, under grant SPA-8554462. The authors would like to thank Greg Davidson, James Kemple, and David Schaffner for skilled research assistance, Brock Murray and Pat Perry of the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction for helping them to interpret the data, and Richard Nelson and Edward Pauly for comments on earlier drafts.
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