Essays on the public sector labor supply

Attracting and retaining a diverse and highly qualified workforce has been a long sought goal of the U. S. public sector. This is particularly important for street-level bureaucrats, whose daily interactions with the public shape citizens’ receipt of public goods and experience with government. This dissertation contains three distinct, but related, chapters that study the determinants of public sector labor supply—with an emphasis on public school teachers. The first chapter of my dissertation uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) 1979 and its intergenerational component, the NLSY Child and Young Adult (CYA) supplement, to test the intergenerational transmission of teaching. The main findings suggest that teaching is in fact passed down within families: Children of teachers are seven percentage points more likely to become teachers compared to the children of non-teachers. However, the transmission of teaching is not uniform. The effect of mother’s teaching status on child’s teaching status is zero for Black sons. These findings suggest that the intergenerational transmission of teaching is one reason that the teaching profession remains disproportionately White and female. The finding that teaching is transmitted across generations motivates the second chapter of my dissertation, which investigates more generally whether public sector employment is transmitted across generations. Using data from the NLSY and CYA, I test the intergenerational correlation coefficient for public sector work. Primary findings indicate that children of public sector mothers are five percentage points more likely to work in the public sector compared to children of non-public sector mothers, with no variation in terms of race or gender. These findings have implications for hiring and promotion practices within the ranks of the public sector. Finally, the third chapter of my dissertation returns to teachers and the lack of racial diversity in the teaching workforce. I use data from the 1999 School and Staffing Survey (SASS) and its longitudinal component, the 2000 Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) to test whether school conditions differentially impact teacher turnover by teacher race/ethnicity. Primary findings indicate that teacher autonomy and leadership support were associated with greater teacher retention. Further, fixed effects results indicate that teachers of color were more likely to remain in teaching conditional upon these school conditions. Implications from these findings suggest that expanding teacher policy and creating more supportive environments for teachers may curb turnover among teachers of color.