Giving every teacher the same raise is a really inefficient way to make schools better.
March 19, 2026
Original Paper
Who Leaves and Who Stays? The Impact of the Teacher Wage Gap on Teacher Quality
SSRN · 6347098
The Takeaway
High-performing teachers are 2.5 times more likely to stay or leave based on pay changes compared to low-performing ones, who tend to stay regardless. This means that targeting wage bonuses specifically at high-productivity teachers can achieve the same overall gain in school quality as a general raise for everyone, but at only 25% of the fiscal cost.
From the abstract
This paper studies how uniform increases in teacher wages affect the average quality of the teaching workforce. I exploit a 2014 French reform that substantially increased wages in highly disadvantaged schools but only modestly in slightly less disadvantaged ones to identify the heterogeneous exit elasticities with respect to wages across teachers of different productivity levels. I show that high-productivity teachers <span>— </span>defined using plausibly unbiased measures of teacher value-add