Research

Teacher shortage in high-poverty schools has been a continuous problem and an obstacle to improving the quality of elementary and secondary education. This paper explores if the current teacher-pay schedule compensates teachers to teach in schools with a larger share of the low-income and disadvantaged minority student population. We employ the hedonic wage regression model with time and state fixed effects to estimate whether teachers working in schools with higher share of free lunch eligible student and non-white student are rewarded in terms of their compensation using the School and Staffing Surveys (SASS) and Common Core of Data (CCD) from 1988 to 2018. We find some evidence of compensating wage differentials when it comes to share of minority student population. However, we did not find support for compensating wage differentials when we examine the share of students eligible for free lunch program. When we split the sample into urban and rural areas, we find that evidence that there are no compensating wage differentials for teachers in rural areas, and there is a wage penalty in high-poverty schools in these regions. This finding is important for policymakers when they are designing optimal compensation packages to attract and retain teachers in rural areas.

The role of state legislators is important because they draft bills that allocate large budgets and impact the lives of citizens. The quality or effectiveness of legislators can be measured by their educational attainment and occupations. Previous literature has examined the education of leaders, but this paper examines their occupations. The aim of this paper is to explore whether state legislators who are lawyers have proved to be more effective. To examine differences in effectiveness among legislators’ occupations, I use the North Carolina legislature data, which is unique in that they rank all legislators by their effectiveness. I apply the unbalanced panel data of North Carolina legislatures from 1977 to 2014 to the pooled ordinary least squares regression model and fixed effects model. Results show that lawyers rank higher in effectiveness percentile points on average, holding other variables constant. Lawyers in the Senate, on average, rank 8.43 to 9.22 percentile points higher in effectiveness, those in the House rank 15.19 to 15.38 percentile points higher, and, as a whole, in the General Assembly, they rank 11.77 to 12.25 percentile points higher. Although the results show higher effectiveness of one occupation, it is worthy to note that legislature also needs occupations in diverse fields to gain perspectives and expertise in different sectors.

The rational choice model assumes that all voters behave rationally and predicts unrealistically low levels of turnout. Ledyard (1984) argues that somewhere between 0 and 100 percent lies the probability of maximum turnout. I test if a mixed strategy equilibrium of voters exists in local elections in the City of Gainesville and Marion County, both in Florida. My results reject the rational choice model that assumes that votes on each side should be the same or different by one vote to make one's vote pivotal. I use individual-level data of voter registration information and voter history in the City of Gainesville Regular and Runoff elections held between 2011 and 2015. I also use similar data in the City of Ocala and Town of Reddick elections held between 2011 and 2017.