No. 981 - The academic and labor market returns of University professors

This paper estimates the impact of university teachers on their students’ academic achievement and labor market outcomes using administrative data from Bocconi University matched with Italian tax records. The estimation exploits the random allocation of students to teachers in a fixed sequence of compulsory courses. We find that the academic and labor market returns of teachers are only mildly positively correlated and that the professors who are best at improving the academic achievement of their best students are not always also the ones who boost their students’ earnings the most, especially for the least able students.