Michael J. Podgursky is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Dr. Podgursky serves on the board of editors of both Education Finance and Policy and the Peabody Journal of Education, as well as on a number of research-institute advisory boards. He also serves as a fellow in education policy at the George W. Bush Institute. He is a co-investigator at the National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the Urban Institute. Dr. Podgursky has published many articles and reports on teacher compensation, teacher quality, and teacher labor markets, and co-authored a book, Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality. Dr. Podgursky earned his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Missouri at Columbia and a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.