| Abstract: | Comparisons of public school teachers' salaries across states are frequently used by the media, teacher organizations, and others to judge how well the teachers in a particular state are paid. These comparisons and the rankings they engender typically do not control for economic factors which could cause salaries to vary across states. In this paper we examine to what degree variation in average teacher salaries is caused by differences across states in the cost of living, the personal characteristics of teachers, the characteristics of teachers' jobs, and the demand for education. We use our results to adjust the average salaries and we compute new state rankings based on these adjusted salaries. For some states the rank based on our adjusted salaries is significantly different from the rank based upon unadjusted salaries. JEL I21, J45] |
