Are Public Basic Education Mexican Teachers Negatively Selected?

Liliana Meza, Universidad Iberoamericana
Carla Pederzini, Universidad Iberoamericana

The role that teachers play in their students´ educational achievement has been a major issue in the education literature. It has been proved that education, on the job experience and training of teachers do not significantly determine the quality of education measured by grades in standarized tests. The demographic composition of basic education teachers (female and old age over-representation) sheds some light about selectivity problems in the teachers labor market. The aim of this paper is to determine whether Mexican primary and secondary teachers are negatively selected in the public education system, and to find out what is the role of the incentive structures in this phenomenon. Using the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo (2000), which is representative at the national level and contains information on occupation, fringe benefits, earnings, second job and other sociodemographic variables, we estimate a probit model where being a teacher in the public and private system is the dependent variable.