My dissertation is comprised of three chapters that analyze various aspects of teacher labor supply. The first two chapters use the same primary data set and similar empirical strategies to investigate substitute-teacher labor supply in an intermediate school district in Michigan. The data comes from an automated calling system used to offer jobs to available substitute teachers and is notable in two respects. First, both accepted and rejected offers are observed, which facilitates the estimation a sequential binary-choice model of substitute teachers' job-offer acceptance decisions. Second, the calling system makes offers in a conditionally random order, which generates exogenous variation in offer quality across substitute teachers. This exogenous variation is exploited to identify the causal effects of a variety of job attributes on substitute teachers' labor-supply decisions.Substitute teachers are an important, but often overlooked, source of instruction in U.S. public schools. Chapter 1 investigates substitute teachers' preferences for several non-wage job characteristics and their potential implications for education policy. I find that important determinants of the offer-acceptance decision include the offer's arrival time, commute time, day of week, classroom type, school type, and school quality. Interestingly, conditional on school quality student demographics do not significantly influence substitutes' decisions. Longer and higher paying full-day jobs are preferred to half-day jobs, although conditional on daily pay, job length does not significantly impact daily labor-supply decisions. Preferences for several job characteristics are found to vary with substitutes' regular-teacher certification status. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.Chapter 2 estimates the causal effect of commute time on daily labor supply. The substitute-teacher labor market is an ideal environment in which to answer this question because workers are subject to daily exogenous variation in commute time and are free to adjust labor supply on a daily basis. The main result is an estimated offer-acceptance elasticity (with respect to commute time) of about -0.4, which suggests that commute time plays an important role in labor supply decisions. The effect of commute time on labor supply is significantly larger on mornings when the temperature is below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, but fuel prices and rain do not significantly alter the effect of commuting. There is no statistically significant difference in the overall aversion to commuting between men and women, however women are particularly averse to commuting the cold weather and are significantly more responsive to fuel prices than men.Chapter 3 investigates the impact of an increase in the stakes of mandatory testing created by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on teacher quality in California. NCLB simultaneously created strong incentives for schools to improve student achievement and increased the stress and pressure on teachers. The empirics use a difference-in-differences identification strategy that compares teachers in tested second-grade classrooms to those in non-tested first-grade classrooms. I find that the probability of second-grade teachers holding a graduate degree significantly decreased in response to (and in anticipation of) NCLB, a small decrease in average years of experience in tested versus non-tested classrooms, and no effect on teacher certification.
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