Job mobility among high skilled and low skilled teachers in Sweden

This paper examines the teacher mobility using matched employee-employer panel data from Swedish lower and upper secondary schools. The core focus is on the teacher quality and its interaction with Swedish institutional setup, which closely resembles what economists usually argue for. In addition to standard quality measures I use a unique dataset containing the population-wide information on cognitive and non-cognitive assessments of males born 1951 or later. The results do not support the common view that schools, in particular these serving disadvantaged students, experience higher turnover of high quality teachers. In fact, both high cognitive and non-cognitive skills teachers are less likely to change employers. The estimates also suggest that teacher mobility decisions can be influenced through changes in monetary compensations and type of employment. Finally, high skilled teachers do not leave the profession, which suggests that the drop in teacher quality should be ascribed to the quality of new entrants.