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Full-Text Articles in Education
Are Teacher Pensions "Hazardous" For Schools?, Patten Priestley Mahler
Are Teacher Pensions "Hazardous" For Schools?, Patten Priestley Mahler
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
I use a detailed panel of data and a unique modeling specification to explore how public schoolteachers respond to the incentives embedded in North Carolina’s retirement system. Like most public-sector retirement plans, North Carolina’s teacher pension implicitly encourages teachers to continue working until they are eligible for their pension benefits, and then leave soon afterward. I find that teachers with higher levels of quality, as measured by a teacher’s value-added to her students’ achievement test scores, are more responsive to the “pull” of teacher pensions. Younger teachers, those with higher salaries, and nonwhite teachers are also more likely to stay …
Intergovernmental (Dis)Incentives, Free-Riding, Teacher Salaries And Teacher Pensions, Maria D. Fitzpatrick
Intergovernmental (Dis)Incentives, Free-Riding, Teacher Salaries And Teacher Pensions, Maria D. Fitzpatrick
Upjohn Institute Working Papers
In this paper, I document evidence that intergovernmental incentives inherent in public sector defined benefit pension systems distort the amount and timing of income for public school teachers. This intergovernmental incentive stems from the fact that, in many states, local school districts are responsible for setting the compensation that determines the size of pensions, but are not required to make contributions to cover the resulting pension fund liabilities. I use the introduction of a policy that required experience-rating on compensation increases above a certain limit in a differences-in-differences framework to identify whether districts are willing to pay the full costs …