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Abstract

We investigate the determinants of teacher absences both within and across schools. We find that teachers generally respond to increased workload by decreasing their rate of absence. Teachers are less likely to be absent when they are teaching larger classes, have new grade assignments or have fewer years of experience. Moreover, we show that when teachers change schools, their absence rate quickly gravitates towards the mean absence rate of their new school, suggesting that school-level factors are an important determinant of absence rates. Finally, we show that the inverse relationship between workload and absence may lead researchers to underestimate the ceteris paribus effect of certain teacher inputs. We illustrate this point in the context of estimating the effect of teacher experience on test scores and show that controlling for absence rates increases the estimated returns to experience by approximately 10%.

5. Conclusion

We show that teacher absences are malleable and respond to aspects such as workload and school-level factors. Theoretically, teachers may take absences as a way to relieve pressure or stress, or they may take absences when their classes are going well. Though we cannot identify the underlying motivation for taking absences, the fact that teachers are more likely to be absent when workload decreases is most consistent with teachers viewing absences as more acceptable when one’s class is running smoothly and requires less intensive effort. As noted in the introduction, we cannot rule out the possibility that absences proxy for high effort instead of low effort, so the most conservative interpretation of our findings is that absences fall in response to increased workloads. The dataset we use has many advantages, but one limitation is that it only represents North Carolina teachers and thus our results may not generalize to other contexts. There is little reason to expect that North Carolina teachers are fundamentally different than teachers in other parts of the country, but unlike in many states, the official absence policy in North Carolina is set at the state level. In areas where absence policies differ across school districts, we expect that the role of districts in determining absencetaking behavior could be more important. That said, the basic structure of North Carolina’s absence policy is very similar to the basic structure of absence policies in many districts outside of North Carolina. Though we have no direct evidence on external validity, we see little reason to expect that the relationship between workload and absences would differ greatly in other U.S. contexts.