Research
Research
Performance Pay at Scale: Evidence from Texas’s Statewide Teacher Incentive Program
Evaluates the effects of Texas’s statewide teacher performance-pay system on teacher retention, mobility, and staffing outcomes.
Abstract
This paper evaluates the impact of the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), a statewide performance-based pay program introduced in Texas in 2019 to improve the recruitment and retention of effective teachers, particularly in rural and high-poverty schools. Using administrative microdata from the Texas Education Agency (2014–2024) linking personnel, designation, and campus funding records, I examine how teacher retention and mobility respond to the phased roll-out of TIA. The empirical strategy utilizes a dynamic difference-in-differences framework following Callaway and Sant’Anna (2021), exploiting variation in the timing of district entry into the program to identify short-run effects.
I find that the TIA generated modest but meaningful improvements in staffing stability, increasing district and campus retention rates by roughly one percentage point, driven primarily by reductions in exits from the public school system. A gravity-model analysis of inter-district flows similarly shows no detectable evidence that treated districts attracted teachers away from non-treated districts. These results suggest that the TIA improves retention among incumbent teachers but does not substantially alter mobility patterns across Texas school districts.
Retrenchment at the Blackboard: How Economic Crises Reshape the Teacher Labor Market
Examines how economic crises reshape teacher labor markets using newly digitized archival teacher records from the Great Depression.
Project Description
This project examines how economic crises affect teacher labor markets using a newly constructed archival panel of teachers in Iowa, Arizona, and Nevada during the Great Depression. By combining historical educational directories, university yearbooks, and Census records, we study how financial distress altered teacher retention, mobility, and labor force participation. Exploiting variation in local school funding constraints prior to the Great Depression, the project investigates how economic downturns reshape the supply and composition of the teacher workforce.
Public Presence and Crime: Evidence from NYC
Uses forecast-error variation in NYC heat alerts to estimate the causal effect of public presence on crime.
Project Description
This paper estimates the causal effect of public presence on crime using heat alerts issued through New York City’s Notify NYC system as an instrument for outdoor activity. Because alerts are triggered by forecasted rather than realized weather conditions, forecast errors generate quasi-random variation in public presence across otherwise similar days. Preliminary results suggest that increased public presence raises crime, particularly drug offenses and felonies, highlighting the importance of victim availability and documenting an unintended public safety benefit of weather alert systems.