Working Papers
School Choice, Teacher Access, and Student Outcomes (Job Market Paper)
Abstract: Unequal access to high-quality teachers is a major barrier to enhancing educational inequality. This paper examines the inequality in teacher access by jointly considering the sorting behaviors of students and teachers, and further investigates how these dynamics exacerbate educational inequality under charter school expansion. By exploiting the expansion of charter schools in North Carolina, I first document the sorting responses of students and teachers at nearby public schools. The opening of a charter school with 500 seats is associated with a 0.023 s.d. reduction in teacher value-added and a 3.15 p.p. increase in the share of low-income students at nearby low-income public schools, while the average effects among all public schools are modest. To better understand this pattern, I develop and estimate a model that incorporates schools' hiring decisions, teachers' job decisions, and students' school choices, accommodating the equilibrium effects of joint sorting. Counterfactual analyses show that 1) the income-based joint sorting of teachers and high-income white students, a process in which both sort into high-income students, widens the income achievement gap by 0.01 s.d. (on the standardized test score distribution); 2) a simulated entry wave of charter schools exacerbates the income-based joint sorting and enlarges the income achievement gap by 0.002 s.d.; and 3) policies aimed at improving access to charter schools for low-income students, including relocating charter schools to low-income areas and offering school bus services, effectively mitigate the increased outcome inequality.
Presentations: BU WERISE 2025 (poster), TSE 2nd Economics of Education Workshop, SOLE 2025 (poster), AEFP 2025
Work in Progress
Flexible Pay Under School Closure: Distributional Impacts in the Teacher Labor Market (Draft coming soon)
Abstract: The design of teacher compensation systems plays a central role in attracting, retaining, and allocating teachers across schools. It has been shown that flexible pay facilitates the efficient allocation of teachers while also generating distributional consequences. Evidence suggests that granting districts larger autonomy in wage determination disproportionately penalizes younger and female teachers, raising concerns about equity in the teaching profession. At the same time, declining enrollment has led many school districts in the U.S. to close or consolidate schools at an increasing rate. By reducing the number of available positions, closures can enhance the bargaining power of districts relative to teachers, potentially altering both employment prospects and wage dynamics. In this paper, I examine how school closures interact with flexible pay schedules to shape labor market outcomes for teachers in Wisconsin. Using coarsened exact matching, I compare labor market outcomes of teachers from closed schools to those from schools that remained open. Fixed-effects regressions indicate that teachers affected by school closures are more likely to exit the teacher labor market, switch districts, and experience salary reductions. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that after school closure, 1) young teachers are more likely to exit the profession and face larger and more persistent reductions in salary and total compensation; 2) among young teachers, untenured ones are more likely to be assigned fewer working hours; and 3) senior male teachers are more likely to switch districts and have a significant and persistent premium in both salary and total compensation. These results suggest that school closures weaken teachers’ bargaining power, with particularly pronounced effects for younger and female teachers. A two-sided matching model of districts and teachers will be used to distinguish between supply- and demand-side contributors.
Presentations: BC Applied Micro Brown Bag
Buying in Small Quantities: Shopping under a Liquidity Constraint, with Linqi Zhang