Efficiency of Empirically Defined Labor Markets for Determining Teachers’ Pay

• In Event: Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Policies, Governance, and the Influence of Accountability on Schools

Abstract

When updating a teacher’s salary schedule a relevant labor market containing comparison school districts is used. Comparisons school districts can be chosen from a policy or an empirical/efficiency perspective. As such, four (supply and demand, economy of scale, ability to pay, and cost-benefit) relevant markets having roots in neoclassical economic literature served as our independent variable, five school districts selected at random served as a blocking variable, and both entry level pay and average teacher pay served as our dependent variables. MANOVA results indicate all labor markets are equally efficient for entry level pay but differ according to the average salary paid teachers. These findings have implications for teacher pay amounts/increases from an applied perspective in the field setting.

Authors

• I. Phillip Young, University of California - Davis

• Henry Tran, University of California - Davis