The Draw of Home: How Teachers' Preferences for Proximity Disadvantage Urban Schools. NBER Working Paper.

This paper explores a little-understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, it finds teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up, and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their hometown. The paper discusses implications of these preferences for the successful recruitment of teachers, including the potential benefits of local recruiting and training. It also discusses implications for the modeling of teacher labor markets, including the possible biases that arise in estimates of compensating differentials when distance is omitted from the analyses. This study contributes to the literature on the geography of labor markets more generally by employing data on residential location during childhood instead of current residence, which may be endogenous to job choice. The final section of the paper summarizes findings on the geographic scope of teacher labor markets and examines their application to policy issues in the recruitment of teachers.(Contains 37 references and 10 tables/figures.) (SM)