Cool people you should know: Marigee Bacolod

Marigee Bacolod is a labor economist who teaches at the University of California - Irvine. She is doing really important work on teacher labor markets. Below, I excerpt three key findings from a recent paper published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, which you can find here:

• "Work conditions play a relatively more important role in determining where new teachers end up choosing to teach, rather than differences in relative teacher wages. Schools with more poor students attract significantly fewer teachers. This is especially true among female teachers.
  
  
• On the other hand, relative teacher wages play a more important role than work conditions at the occupational entry decision, when male and female new college graduates are deciding to teach.
  
  
• This paper also presents findings on the sorting of teachers across schools by ability. Conditional on choosing to teach, those with higher scholastic aptitude (in terms of SAT scores and college GPA) are significantly less likely to teach in central city schools compared to suburban schools."