Teacher Attrition and Mobility Over Time

We use 35 years of data on public school teachers in Washington to calculate several different measures of teacher attrition and mobility. We explore how these rates vary over time and their relationship with the state unemployment rate. Annual rates of teacher attrition from the workforce have been between 5% and 8% for each of the past 35 years, and there is a strong negative relationship between unemployment rates and these rates of attrition. This history suggests that teacher attrition is likely to increase as the economy recovers after the pandemic, but this increase is likely to be modest.

Beer in Good Times and Bad: A U.S. State-Level Analysis of Economic Conditions and Alcohol Consumption

Data on U.S. state-level beer shipments from 1970 to 2007 provided by The Beer Institute are used to estimate pooled time-series models of annual consumption regressed on economic and demographic variables, using the common correlated effects (CCE) estimators to control for unobserved common effects and to allow for heterogeneous responses across units. Beer is found to be a procyclical good, varying negatively with the state unemployment rate. Previous findings for the negative effect of excise taxes on consumption are supported, though the estimated elasticities are smaller than those reported in earlier research. Demographics have a significant and material effect on consumption, with larger shares of young adults in the population implying greater consumption of beer per capita. (JEL Classification: D12, C23)