Analysis of the Educational Personnel System

Presents three theories of labor mobility and shows how they apply to the market for primary and secondary school teachers: the purely economic theory of human capital model, the institutional theory of internal labor markets, and a purely probabilistic Markov model. The theory of human capital emphasizes that the special skills and information workers bring to or learn on a job may not be transferable to other jobs. It uses the concepts of recruitment costs and job search costs to explain the sluggishness of job adjustment to market conditions. The theory of internal labor markets is used to examine labor mobility from a more institutional perspective. It emphasizes the ways in which labor markets are segmented for social, geographic, and institutional reasons. Probabilistic models of labor flows are a third approach to the understanding of labor turnover. These models are integrated with human capital and internal labor market approaches.