The role of teacher quality in retention and hiring: Using applications to transfer to uncover preferences of teachers and schools

Many large urban school districts are rethinking their personnel management strategies, often giving increased control to schools in the hiring of teachers, reducing, for example, the importance of seniority. If school hiring authorities are able to make good decisions about whom to hire, these reforms have the potential to benefit schools and students. Prior research on teacher transfers uses career history data, identifying the school in which a teacher teaches in each year. When such data are used to see which teachers transfer, it is unclear the extent to which the patterns are driven by teacher preferences or school preferences, because the matching of teachers to schools is a two‐sided choice. This study uses applications‐to‐transfer data to examine separately which teachers apply for transfer and which get hired and, in so doing, differentiates teacher from school preferences. Holding all else equal, we find that teachers with better pre‐service qualifications (certification exam scores, college competitiveness) are more likely to apply for transfer, while teachers whose students demonstrate higher achievement growth are less likely. On the other hand, schools prefer to hire “higher quality” teachers across measures that signal quality. The results suggest that not only do more effective teachers prefer to stay in their schools but that schools are able to identify and hire the best candidates when given the opportunity © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Neo‐patrimonialism and Corruption: Evidence from 8,436 Firms in 17 Countries in Sub‐Saharan Africa

This article introduces four innovations to the literature on administrative corruption. First, it employs a neo‐patrimonialism framework by addressing measurement, identification, and endogeneity issues that beset the literature. Second, unlike cross‐country studies, it uses firms as the unit of analysis. Third, unlike the conventional literature, the article uses large‐n (n = 8,436) panel survey data of key informants in 17 countries in sub‐Saharan Africa. Finally, unlike the conventional literature, the article focuses on a particular type of corruption: the supply and demand for bribery. The authors find that the uncertainty associated with neo‐patrimonialism has a strong, positive, and significant effect on the propensity of civil servants to demand bribes in exchange for services and for firms to supply bribes in exchange for winning government contracts. The results are robust to controls on the characteristics of firms and their regulatory environments. The article concludes with implications for research and practice.     

Local supply,temporal dynamics,and unrealized potential in teacher hiring

We explore the dynamics of competitive search in the K–12 public education sector. Using detailed panel data on teacher hiring from Boston Public Schools, we document how teacher labor supply varies substantially across vacancies even within a single district depending on position type, school characteristics, and the timing of job postings. We find that early-posted positions are more likely to be filled and end up securing new hires that are better qualified, more effective, and more likely to remain at a school. In contrast, the number of applicants to a position is largely unassociated with hire quality, suggesting that schools may struggle to identify and select the best candidates even when there is a large pool of qualified applicants. These patterns persist even when we restrict comparisons to only positions within an individual school using school fixed effects. Our findings point to substantial unrealized potential for improving teacher hiring.     

Do some enterprise zones create jobs?

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment‐level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase employment. However, the evidence also suggests that the enterprise zone program has a more favorable effect on employment in zones that have a lower share of manufacturing and in zones where managers report doing more marketing and outreach activities. On the other hand, devoting more effort to helping firms get hiring tax credits reduces or eliminates any positive employment effects, which may be attributable to idiosyncrasies of California's enterprise zone program during the period we study. © 2010 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Chains of Love? Global Production and the Firm‐Level Diffusion of Labor Standards

Under what conditions does the global economy serve as a means for the diffusion of labor standards and practices? We anticipate variation among internationally engaged firms in their propensity to improve labor standards. Upgrading is most likely when a firm's products exhibit significant cross‐market differences in markups, making accessing high‐standards overseas markets particularly profitable. Additionally, upgrading is more likely when lead firms attach a high salience to labor standards. Therefore, while participation in global production induces “trading up” behaviors among firms overall, the effect strength varies across industries. We test our expectations via a survey experiment, which queries foreign firms operating in Vietnam about their willingness to invest in labor‐related upgrading. We find strong evidence for the effect of markups on upgrading choices and suggestive evidence for the saliency mechanism.     

An Elite Theory of Political Consulting and Its Implications for U.S. House Election Competition

Does the hiring of political consultants make election races more competitive? If so, why? Most scholars of political consulting argue their expertise enhances competition; I argue that consultant reputation also boosts competition. Many political consultants are part of the Washington establishment, which notices their association with candidates. In particular, congressional candidates of the out party, especially challengers, have an incentive to hire the most reputable consultants to signal to political elites their viability. I demonstrate a positive empirical relationship between out-party candidates hiring top consultants (compared to less reputable ones) and how competitive their race is perceived by elites. These findings and theoretical insight provide a basis for understanding the high costs of political consultants and their impact on election outcomes.     

Deregulation and the Racial Composition of Airlines

Economic theory suggests that the enhanced product market competition of deregulation reduces employers' ability to discriminate when hiring. Recent studies of the effect of deregulation on racial employment in the naturally competitive trucking industry find that deregulation increased minority employment. This study examines the effect of deregulation on racial employment in the airline industry. Because deregulation transformed airlines from wasteful service competition to rigorous price competition, deregulation's effect on racial hiring in this continuously competitive industry is not apparent. This study finds that deregulation only modestly changed the racial composition of major airline occupations, which suggests that the change in market structure as a result of deregulation may largely determine the effect of regulatory reform on the racial composition of an industry. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Corporate dividend policy,minority shareholders right and equity value of firm: Evidence from Singapore

The purpose of the paper is to find out empirically whether an ideal business environment coupled with adequate legal protection provides an enabling mechanism for the minority shareholders to extract dividend from the firms and, as a consequence, whether the equity value of the firms gets impacted by dividend policy. The study (a) employs Tobit model on a sample of FTSE ST companies of Singapore to show the relation between dividend and minority shareholders base and, then (b) sought to explore the relation between equity value and dividend policy in the backdrop of strong legal protection for minority shareholders through OLS and 2 SLS regression models. The study empirically demonstrates a positive relation between the dividend payout and minority shareholders base indicating that, in a civil law origin country with strong corporate governance code ensuring investors protection and property right, the minority shareholders can extract dividend from the firms that, in turn, has a favourable impact on equity valuation. Consistent with the “outcome” and “catering model,” the findings of the study indicate that the overall business environment and legal protection enable minority shareholders to assert their cash flow rights with positive valuation implication. The paper objectively reveals how superior business environment, good governance and property right impact inter‐play between dividend payout, minority shareholders base and valuation of a civil law country.     

Tax Toleration and Tax Compliance: How Government Affects the Propensity of Firms to Enter the Unofficial Economy

How do government‐supplied institutional benefits and the taxation and regulation of producers affect the propensity of private firms to enter the unofficial economy and evade taxation? We propose a model in which the incentive of firms to operate underground depends on tax rates relative to firm‐specific thresholds of tax toleration that are decisively affected by quality of governance—in particular by the presence of high‐grade institutions delivering services enhancing official production that anchor profit‐maximizing firms to the official economy. Some key predictions of the model concerning the determinants of firms' tax toleration and tax compliance receive broad support from empirical analyses of enterprise‐level data from the World Bank's World Business Environment Surveys.     

Privatising war: assessing the decision to hire private military contractors

There has been a huge growth in the size and number of Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) in the last decade or so. In this context, the question of when, if ever, states should hire PMSCs to carry out military operations has gained particular urgency. In this paper, I defend the answer that states should do so whenever PMSCs will be the most effective agents available against a number of recent objections. All of these objections claim that considerations aside from the relative effectiveness of PMSCs should bear on the question. Some argue that there is something inherently morally problematic with hiring PMSCs, and thus infer that they should sometimes not be hired even when they are the most effective agents available. Others point to undesirable side-effects that hiring PMSCs is thought to cause, and claim that these should be taken into account when deciding whether to hire them. I argue, however, that all of these further considerations are either irrelevant to the decision or reducible to effectiveness.     

Race,Gender, and Government Contracting: Different Explanations or New Prospects for Theory?

The U.S. Congress created the Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) and Women‐Owned Small Business (WOSB) programs to promote fairness in government contracting. In this article, the authors examine whether increases in racial and gender representation in federal agencies correlate with the proportion of contract dollars awarded to women‐ and minority‐owned firms. Using the theory of representative bureaucracy as a starting point, they find evidence that increases in passive minority representation result in a larger proportion of contract dollars awarded to minority‐owned firms, which comports with previous empirical research. There is no evidence, however, that female representation leads directly or indirectly to substantive benefits for women‐owned small businesses. Given that the findings for women do not support representative bureaucracy, the authors provide potential alternative explanations. Specifically, they consider gender bias, social identity, and the “queen bee” phenomenon as possible explanations for why women are less inclined to advocate for other women.     

Discrimination and diversity: Market and non-market settings

This paper analyzes discrimination in light of two possibilities (1) that variety has a positive marginal value and (2) that it is less costly to deal with more homogeneous inputs. In market settings it explains the anomaly that firms practicing discrimination in hiring may survive in a competitive environment. In non-market settings it explains the minority separatism practiced under the name of “multiculturalism” on college campuses. Curriculum reforms in the direction of more ethnic, racial and religious “exclusivity” may be understood as attempts to change the constraints within which individuals of diverse cultural backgrounds, brought together into intimate contact, may maximize their utilities.     

Equity in Federal Contracting: Examining the Link between Minority Representation and Federal Procurement Decisions

The federal government increasingly relies on nongovernmental organizations for procuring goods and services. This long‐term trend presents a significant challenge for administrators because it risks the egalitarian values of democracy by further distancing administrative action from direct, participative, democratic oversight. The authors put forward a theory of representative bureaucracy as a way to reconcile democracy with the reality of the contemporary policy process in which unelected officials are the principal decision makers. The theory is tested in the domain of federal procurement, specifically within the contract award decisions of 60 federal agencies over three years. The authors argue that increased minority representation in leadership positions results in an increased proportion of federal contracts awarded to small minority‐owned firms.     

The Impact of Affirmative Action on the Employment of Minorities and Women: A Longitudinal Analysis Using Three Decades of EEO‐1 Filings

What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of this question by exploiting rich variation across firms in the timing of federal contracting to identify affirmative action effects over the course of three decades spanning 1973 to 2003. It constitutes the first study to comprehensively document the long‐term and dynamic effects of affirmative action in federal contracting on employment composition within firms in the United States. I use a new panel of over 100,000 large private‐sector firms from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, including both firms that obtain federal contracts and are therefore mandated to implement affirmative action and firms that are noncontractors, across all industries and regions. The paper's key results indicate that the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action in federal contracting over 1973 to 2003 were black and Native American women and men. Dynamic event study analysis of workforce composition around the time of contracting reveals that a large part of the effect of affirmative action on increasing protected group shares occurred within the first four years of gaining a contract, and that these increased shares persisted even after a firm was no longer a federal contractor. The paper also uncovers important results on how the impact of affirmative action evolved over 1973 to 2003, in particular that the fastest growth in the employment shares of minorities and women at federal contractors relative to noncontracting firms occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s, decelerating substantially in ensuing years.     

A mobility strategy for improving opportunity

Abstract

Postwar changes in the metropolitan settlement structure have profoundly altered the geography of opportunity in the older cities of the Northeast and Midwest. Poverty is concentrated in once‐central cities, while employment continues to deconcentrate to the suburbs. In the face of these changes, antipoverty policy has become a geographic exercise of moving people and resources from certain places to other places.

The three main strategies for confronting inner‐city poverty are dispersal, development, and mobility. These strategies are discussed and compared, with particular emphasis on the mobility approach. The article argues that the mobility approach—which connects poor inner‐city residents to suburban employment opportunities without changing the location of households or firms—is the most promising near‐term strategy for combating urban poverty.     

Community Privilege and Environmental Justice: An Agent‐Based Analysis

Several theories compete to explain observed race‐ and ethnicity‐based environmental injustice in society. This paper focuses on analyzing the extent to which firms' siting decisions based on community privilege can explain this outcome. A unique feature of this analysis is that we include analysis of both unwanted land uses (disamenity firms) and desired land uses (amenity firms). The environmental justice analysis of amenities other than green spaces is rare, but amenities are crucial components of urban areas to which environmental justice studies must attend. We use an agent‐based model to explore community outcomes when environmental disamenities choose locations based on low community privilege, and compare this with scenarios in which disamenities only seek to minimize the cost of land. We also assess differences in environmental justice outcomes when amenities choose locations in areas with high community privilege. While disamenities' focus on locating in areas with low community privilege indeed affects environmental equity, the effect of amenity location is also important, and there are powerful interaction effects. The importance of privilege‐based location is found in these simulations regardless of which social group—majority or minority—is assumed to be the privileged group. This study suggests a limitation of EJ policies and models that focus on the politics of disamenity siting without considering the politics of amenity siting.     

Exploring the actions of Government Affairs Managers during economic and financial crises—an exploratory study in the European Union

This paper is a response to the paucity of theoretical and empirical research into the political actions undertaken by organisations to influence policymakers' responses to economic and financial crises. By using original, primary data gathered from semi‐structured interviews conducted with Brussels‐based Government Affairs Managers of multi‐national enterprises, it reports the results of inductive, exploratory research into corporate political activity during the 2007–2011 financial crisis. Results suggest that not all firms are in favour of increased regulatory intervention during times of economic upheaval. They also imply that, during recessions, firms are more likely to seek long‐term as opposed to short‐term relationships with policymakers, they also have a greater propensity to engage in collective political action than individual political action and they use information strategies more frequently than constituency‐building and financial‐incentive strategies. These results are subsequently used as the basis for a conceptual framework that draws on numerous theoretical traditions to capture the antecedents of firms' political behaviours during economic crises. Given the absence of theoretical and empirical work that actively engages with this issue, the research makes important contributions to the existing literature on corporate political activity. It also has practical implications for corporate political strategists and policymakers. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Documenting Disparity in Minority Contracting: Legal Requirements and Recommendations for Policy Makers

The challenge of advancing policy goals and public administration is compounded when legal compliance rests on data and complex analysis. This is true of disparity studies that support local government‐sponsored minority contracting programs. How can local governments prepare to work with such programs in this complex environment? The authors analyze several court cases challenging minority contracting programs and illustrate the difficulty of administering public programs at the juncture of public policy goals, subtle changes in law, and demands for quality statistical analysis. Many public agencies, especially at the local level, are not prepared to address the data requirements demanded by these programs. To help with this challenge, the authors develop a set of guiding principles to help practitioners satisfy the legal requirements and meet the policy goals of minority contracting and similar programs. This includes a new emphasis on continuous gathering of valid, local‐level data.     

The Productivity Costs of Inefficient Hiring Practices: Evidence From Late Teacher Hiring

We use matched employee–employer records from the teacher labor market to explore the effects of late teacher hiring on student achievement. Hiring teachers after the school year starts reduces student achievement by 0.042 SD in mathematics and 0.026 SD in reading. This reflects, in part, a temporary disruption effect in the first year. In mathematics, but not in reading, late‐hired teachers remain persistently less effective, evidence of negative selection in the teacher labor market. Late hiring concentrates in schools that disproportionately serve disadvantaged student populations, contributing to challenges in ensuring an equitable distribution of educational resources for all students.