TY  - JOUR
AU  - Boyd,Donald
AU  - Lankford,Hamilton
AU  - Loeb,Susanna
TI  - The Draw of Home: How Teachers' Preferences for Proximity Disadvantage Urban Schools
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9953
PY  - 2003
Y2  - September 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9953
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9953.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Donald Boyd
The Center for Policy Research
University of Albany
135 Western Ave.
Albany, NY  12222
E-Mail: donboyd5@gmail.com

Hamilton Lankford
School of Education, ED 317
University at Albany
State University of New York
Albany, NY 12222
E-Mail: hamp@albany.edu

Susanna Loeb
524 CERAS, 520 Galvez Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA  94305
Tel: 650/725-4262
E-Mail: sloeb@stanford.edu
AB  - This paper explores a little understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, we find teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their hometown. We discuss implications of these preferences for the successful recruitment of teachers, including the potential benefits of local recruiting and training. We also discuss implications for the modeling of teacher labor markets, including the possible biases that arise in estimates of compensating differentials when distance is omitted from the analyses. This study contributes to the literature on the geography of labor markets more generally by employing data on residential location during childhood instead of current residence, which may be endogenous to job choice.
ER  -