Do Teachers' Labour Contracts Matter?

ABSTRACT Previous literature on the effects of tenured and tenure‐track versus non‐tenure‐track professors on student performance at the university level finds mixed results. Our paper is the first to investigate whether student performance at school differs depending on whether tenured/tenure‐track or non‐tenure‐track teachers teach them. We use data on standardised test scores from a representative sample of primary school students in Italy and information on their Italian and mathematics teachers' labour contracts. Controlling for class‐fixed effects, subject‐fixed effects, and teacher characteristics, we find that students taught by non‐tenure‐track teachers exhibit, on average, a 0.18 standard deviation lower performance. Hence, job insecurity among primary school teachers is associated with lower student outcomes.