The paper considers the teachers' labour market in Italy. The quality and motivation of teachers are certainly among the determinants of pupils' achievement, but they are difficult to measure, so we examine the composition of the pool of teachers and their behaviour to infer information about them. We look also at the institutional features that motivate the implicit contract that drives Italian teachers' behaviour, which essentially involves low salary and correspondingly low commitment and effort. In particular we examine the mechanism that allocates teachers to schools. For each school we construct three indicators; one indicating the level of turnover, which we interpret as a source of turmoil; one that refers to the mismatch between tenured teachers and their school; and a "revealed preferences indicator" that measures the schools' quality as evaluated by the population of tenured teachers. We measure the association at the school level of our indicators with achievement as gauged by PISA 2003. Students scores are correlated negatively to the turnover and the mismatch indicators, positively to revealed preferences.
Published in 2007 in: Giornale degli economisti e annali di economia, v. 66, 3, pp. 335-373
