Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Thesis Format

Monograph

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Economics

Supervisor

Stinebrickner, Todd R.

2nd Supervisor

Mehta, Nirav

Joint Supervisor

Abstract

This thesis consists of three substantive chapters, which explore topics related to the economics of education. Two of the chapters examine teacher labour markets, and one chapter examines the earnings of university graduates.

In Chapter 2, I create a new and unique dataset to examine how teacher characteristics affect the probability of acquiring a permanent teaching position in the Ontario public school system. This chapter provides evidence of how difficult it was for recent Ontario teachers’ college graduates to obtain a teaching job. The odds of finding a position in 2006 were, on average, around four times higher than they were in 2013. Moreover, qualified French-language teachers were, on average, three to five times more likely to find a job than teachers without French-language qualifications.

In Chapter 3, I take advantage of restricted-access data to examine what is more important for earnings — the university that a student attends or the program that he or she pursues. In particular, this chapter uses a method called relative-importance analysis, which partitions the variation in earnings into program and school components and thus allows me to determine the degree to which they affect earnings. The results show that there is more variation in earnings across programs than schools. Programs account for between two and eleven times the amount of variation in earnings than schools, depending on gender, degree type and period since graduation.

In Chapter 4, I estimate the outside-option salaries of recent Ontario teachers’ college graduates from the 2007 to 2013 graduating cohorts and compare them to teaching salaries from the same cohorts. To do this, I create a new teacher salary dataset and combine it with the data from the first two chapters. The results show that median teaching salaries did not vary to any great extent across genders, cohorts and time periods since graduation. However, the median outside-option salaries varied substantially across those same factors. Moreover, the median teaching salaries were greater than outside-option salaries across all factors. Also, despite there not being any gender differences in teaching salaries, the outside-option median salaries were substantially greater for males than females.

Summary for Lay Audience

This thesis consists of three substantive chapters, which explore topics related to the economics of education. Two of the chapters examine teacher labour markets, and one chapter examines the earnings of university graduates.

In Chapter 2, I create a new and unique dataset to provide evidence of how difficult it was for recent Ontario teachers' college graduates to obtain a teaching job. The odds of finding a position in 2006 were, on average, around four times higher than they were in 2013. Moreover, qualified French-language teachers were, on average, three to five times more likely to find a job than teachers without French-language qualifications.

In Chapter 3, I take advantage of data provided by the government to examine what is more important for earnings — the university that a student attends or the program that he or she pursues. In particular, this chapter uses methods that allow me to determine the degree to which programs and schools affect earnings. Overall, the results show that programs have a substantially greater effect on earnings than schools.

In Chapter 4, I estimate salaries of recent Ontario teachers' college graduates from the 2007 to 2013 graduating cohorts who did not acquire permanent teaching jobs in the Ontario public school system (teaching jobs) and compare them to the graduates who did find those jobs. To accomplish this, I create a new teacher salary dataset and combine it with the data from the first two chapters. The results show that median teaching salaries did not vary to any great extent across genders, cohorts and time periods since graduation. However, the median non-teaching salaries varied substantially across those same factors. Moreover, the median teaching salaries were greater than non-teaching salaries across all factors. Also, despite there not being any gender differences in teaching salaries, the non-teaching median salaries were substantially greater for males than females.

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