Obtaining data on teachers’ actual wages was therefore not sufficient for exploring my research question, as the issues with between school and within school selection outlined above meant that actual pay may not have provided me with the causal effect of teachers’ wages on pupil performance.
To get round this, I opted to instead look at teachers’ predicted austria rcs data wages. Using the Labour Force Survey (LFS), accessed via the UK Data Service, I estimated how much money Iwould expect a teacher in England to earn based on their sex, age, and year in the LFS. I then assigned each teacher in TIMSS a predicted wage based on their sex, age and the year they are observed.
As teachers’ predicted wages are correlated with actual wages, but not the omitted variables that also influence pupil outcomes, I argue that the estimates are less likely to be affected by omitted variable bias (endogeneity) and can be interpreted as the causal effect of teachers’ wages on pupil performance and enjoyment of learning.