The effect of teachers’ wages on student achievement: evidence from Brazil

Résumé

We evaluate the effect of teachers’ wages on pupils’ achievement in a developing country (Brazil), using a good quality micro-dataset (the 2001 wave of SAEB). We estimate education production functions to investigate “whether teachers’ wages matter”, and we also apply quantile regressions to asses “for whom they matter most”. Results show that teachers’ wages have a small, positive, average effect on pupils’ scores in private, but not in public schools, in both Portuguese and Mathematics tests. In private schools, Portuguese teachers’ wages have a greater impact on the scores of low-performing than of highperforming pupils, while in Mathematics no clear pattern
is revealed. Main results are maintained when instrumental variables and two-stage least absolute deviation estimations are carried out. Our analysis suggests that there is scope for Brazilian public schools to improve their human resources policies, with potential benefits accruing to low-performing pupils.