Weak Markets, Strong Teachers: Recession at Career Start and Teacher Effectiveness

We thank seminar audiences at Harvard University, the Ifo Institute, the University of Munich, RWI Essen, and the University of Konstanz as well as conference participants at the NBER Education Spring Meeting, the SOLE-EALE World Meetings in Montreal, the Spring Meeting of Young Economists in Ghent, the Workshop of the German Network of Young Microeconometricians, the Econometric Society World Congress in Montreal, the annual meeting of the European Economic Association in Mannheim, the European Summer Symposium in Labor Economics, and the CESifo Area Conference in the Economics of Education for valuable suggestions. We also thank David Autor, Michael Boehm, Raj Chetty, Matthew Chingos, Andy de Barros, David Deming, Christian Dustmann, Bernd Fitzenberger, Mathilde Godard, Joshua Goodman, Anna Gumpert, Eric A. Hanushek, Lawrence Katz, Asim Khwaja, Amanda Pallais, Jonah Rockoff, Monika Schnitzer, Ludger Woessmann, and especially Martin Watzinger for valuable comments and suggestions. Max Mandl provided excellent research assistance. Nagler gratefully acknowledges financial support by the DFG through SFB TR 15 and the Elite Network of Bavaria through Evidence-Based-Economics. He further thanks the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University for its hospitality while writing parts of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• July 22, 2015