This article considers a subset of lawsuits in which emancipated people sued to have their enslavers' bequests to them honored. It contends that we should see these suits as contests over reparations. By exploring this unappreciated history, this article argues that enslavers themselves believed reparations were due and were willing to pay them,…

The U.S. has witnessed a resurgence of labor activism, with teachers at the forefront. We examine how teacher strikes affect compensation, working conditions, and productivity with an original dataset of 772 teacher strikes generating 48 million student days idle between 2007 and 2023. Using an event study framework, we find that, on average,…

Uncertified teachers are the foundation of early childhood systems across the nation. As states and districts move into professionalizing early childhood education, experienced but uncertified teachers are facing the need to enroll in teacher preparation programs to receive certification and retain their jobs. This article investigates the effects…

Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but…

This paper provides novel evidence on how a sharp increase in labor force participation among older women affects the provision of informal care to their older parents. Based on data from Understanding Society -- The UK Household Longitudinal Study, we use an instrumental variable approach that exploits a unique reform that increased the female…

Reparations policies that seek to make amends for a harm incurred face exigent challenges. In this article we focus on what makes reparations successful and what policy components are necessary, if not sufficient, for success. To study the success of reparations policy design we employ a case study approach. Our analysis investigates the…

Many school nurses experienced increased work burden and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis examined data from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cross-sectional, nationwide survey of school nurses in March 2022 to examine associations between school nurses' ability to conduct their core responsibilities and selected…

A committee report accompanying a national defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2022 includes a provision for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the Department of Defense's (DOD's) payroll system for overseas DOD Education Activity employees. This report: (1) describes the status of DOD's efforts to address auditors' prior…

This concurrent, mixed-methods case study explores faculty valuation of economic and social rewards after participating in at least one of four educational development programs offered by our Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) at a large, public, R1 institution. We wanted to know if the effectiveness of such programs might vary depending on the…

A detailed, unbiased perspective of the inter-relations among medical fields could help students make informed decisions on their future career plans. Using a data-driven approach, the inter-relations among different medical fields were decomposed and clustered based on the similarity of their working environments. Publicly available, aggregate…

This article explores an important aspect of academic precarity: the use of fixed-term contract researchers as factotums within universities. The practice can be defined as the taking-on of tasks that are outside of core research activities, including substantial amounts of time spent teaching, supervising students and preparing research…

Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.9 percent smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely…

Scientific research is the important task of lecturers in universities. However, university lecturers often struggle to balance research and teaching and focus more on teaching than research. In addition, the motivation for lecturers to do research is a little. This article surveys lecturers at some universities in Vietnam to find the factors that…

College students make job decisions without complete information. As a result, they may rely on misleading heuristics ("interesting jobs pay badly") and pursue options misaligned with their goals. We test whether highlighting job characteristics changes decision making. We find increasing the salience of a job's monetary benefits…

Researchers have posited various theories to explain supposed declines in teaching quality: the expansion of labor market opportunities for women, low relative wages, compressed compensation structures, and substituting quantity for quality. We synthesize these previous theories and expand on the current literature by incorporating a useful…