Olszak, Ivan; (2024) Teacher-pupil sorting, learning, and inequality: Essays in Industrial Organization and Education. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis uses a structural, two-sided model of the education system to study interactions between parents' school choices and teachers' labour supply decisions in the context of secondary education in England. These interactions are likely to play a critical role in shaping the equilibrium effects of various education policies, notably the expansion of school choice, whereby households are allowed to apply to their preferred schools instead of being assigned to their neighbourhood school. If different types of households value school performance to different extents, and if teachers prefer teaching certain types of pupils, then the expansion of school choice might alter not just the assignment of pupils to schools but also the assignment of teachers to schools, which might in turn have implications in terms of inequalities in learning outcomes. To model these interactions, I combine some models used in labour and education economics with features derived from the Industrial Organization tradition. On the ‘demand side’, parents have preferences over school attributes, including their attainment scores. On the ‘supply side’, teachers also have preferences over school attributes, including the wages they offer but also the proportion of disadvantaged pupils on their roll. Teachers are heterogeneous both in terms of their preferences and their effectiveness at improving pupils' test scores. The labour market for teachers is subject to frictions which are captured in a model of job search, where teachers receive offers from schools at random rates, and move to a different job when the value of an offer exceeds the value of the job they hold. Between pupils and teachers, schools operate an ‘education production function’, whereby the test scores of pupils depend on the size and composition of their teaching workforce. Schools receive a budget allocation and set wages to hire the teaching workforce that maximises the test scores of the pupils on their rolls. The empirical estimation shows that more affluent households put more weight on school performance when applying for school places, and teachers tend to prefer working for schools with children from more affluent families. These preferences generate sorting effects where children from more disadvantaged households tend to be taught by less experienced and less effective teachers, which increases inequality in learning outcomes.

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