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Professional references are widely used in hiring decisions, yet their effectiveness remains largely understudied. This study analyzes structured ratings collected from the professional references of teacher applicants and conduct an experiment to see whether the ratings influence hiring managers' assessments of applicants and hiring decisions. There is little evidence that providing reference ratings to hiring managers influences their evaluations of candidates or hiring choices in productive ways. However, the analysis suggests that reference ratings are predictive of future job performance independent of other applicant information available to hiring managers. The result is a paradox: reference ratings offer potentially low-cost, high-value information, but hiring managers do not appear to make productive use of them.

Retirement plans can create strong financial incentives that have important labor market implications, and many states have adopted alternative plan designs that significantly change these incentives. The authors use longitudinal data to investigate the impact of Washington State's 1996 introduction of a hybrid retirement plan on late-career attrition. The unique setup of Washington's plans allows them to provide empirical evidence on the influence of financial incentives created by statutory retirement eligibility thresholds. Findings show that despite facing very different financial incentives, teachers enrolled in the hybrid and traditional plans respond similarly to reaching a key retirement eligibility threshold. The authors hypothesize that teachers are anchoring to the eligibility thresholds, muting the influence of the financial incentives. They also provide evidence that, in the presence of bright-line eligibility thresholds that can anchor workers' separation behavior, commonly used structural models may overpredict workers' responsiveness to the financial incentives embedded in retirement plans. [This paper will be published in "ILR Review."]

Turnover in the teacher workforce imposes significant costs to schools, both in terms of student achievement and the time and expense required to recruit and train new staff. This paper examines the potential for structured ratings of teacher applicants, solicited from their professional references, to inform hiring decisions through the selection of teachers who are less likely to turn over. Specifically, we analyze the predictive validity of reference ratings with respect to retention outcomes among subsequently employed applicants. We find that a summative reference ratings measure is modestly predictive of retention in a teacher's school, with a one-standard deviation change associated with a 3.2 percentage point increase in the probability of school retention. When we account for rater fixed effects, we find substantially stronger relationships between reference ratings and retention, with a one-standard deviation change in our summative ratings measure associated with an increase in the probability of school retention of 8.5 percentage points. These findings suggest that raters themselves are a large source of variation in the distribution of reference ratings. So, while we find predictive validity of professional ratings, their potential to inform good hiring decisions depends on, among other things, the ability of hiring managers to account for rater variation when interpreting references' assessments of applicants.

While the practice of collecting information from applicants' professional references is widespread, there is a paucity of research linking references' assessments of applicants to subsequent performance. In this paper, we examine the predictive validity of a specific type of reference-provided information: categorical ratings of teacher applicants collected from their professional references -- a potentially low cost means of enhancing the applicant information available during the hiring process. We find an overall significant relationship between reference ratings and teacher performance as measured by observational evaluation ratings and teacher value-added in math, but that this relationship is moderated by two factors. First, while references' ratings of applicants with prior teaching experience are predictive of performance, those of novice applicants are not. Second, the predictive validity of reference ratings varies according to rater type: ratings from references identified as the applicants' "Principal/Other Supervisor," "Instructional Coach/Department Chair," or "Colleague" are significantly predictive of performance while those from other types of raters are not. Overall, our findings show that meaningful information can be solicited from applicants' references in the form of categorical ratings but also demonstrate some limitations in the potential for this type of information to inform hiring decisions. [This is the online version of an article published in "Education Finance and Policy."]