Teacher Turnover and Non-Pecuniary Factors

Abstract

This paper studies teacher mobility using matched employee-employer panel data from Norwegian primary and lower secondary schools. The Norwegian institutional set-up with completely centralized wage setting for teachers is ideal to analyze the effect of non-pecuniary job attributes on quit decisions. We find that teachers tend to leave schools with high share of minority students and high share of students with special needs. In addition, the composition of teachers and the school size affect the propensity to quit. These results are robust across different econometric specifications and sub-samples.