This paper examines the impact of increasing teacher salaries on student outcomes by exploiting variation from the "50K The First Day" campaign that established a $50K salary floor for new teachers across New Jersey school districts. Using school-level data from 2003 to 2019, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences (DiD) approach…

Researchers have good data on teachers' annual salaries but a hazy understanding of teachers' hours of work. This makes it difficult to calculate an accurate hourly wage and leads policy makers to default to anecdote rather than fact when debating teacher pay. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that teachers work an average of…