Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

Resource type
Authors/contributors
Title
Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School
Abstract
We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers' attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and the children's test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations. We estimate a structural dynamic labor supply model and find that teachers respond strongly to financial incentives. Our model is used to compute cost-minimizing compensation policies. (JEL I21, J31, J45, O15)
Publication
American Economic Review
Volume
102
Issue
4
Pages
1241-1278
Date
2012-06-01
Journal Abbr
American Economic Review
Language
en
ISSN
0002-8282
Short Title
Incentives Work
Accessed
03/06/2021, 08:41
Library Catalogue
DOI.org (Crossref)
Citation
Duflo, E.; Hanna, R.; Ryan, S.P. 2012. ‘Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School’. In: American Economic Review, 102(4), 1241–1278. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.102.4.1241.