Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives

Pascal Courty, Do Han Kim () and Gerald Marschke
Additional contact information
Do Han Kim: University at Albany, SUNY

No 3909, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Can enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices' for serving different demographic subgroups of clients, influence case workers' choice of intake population. Exploiting exogenous variation in these shadow prices, we show that training agencies change the composition of their enrollee populations in response to changes in the incentives, increasing the relative fraction of subgroups whose shadow prices increase. We also show that the increase is due to training agencies enrolling at the margin weaker members, in terms of performance, of that subgroup.

Keywords: performance measurement; bureaucrat behavior; cream-skimming; public organizations; enrolment incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H72 J33 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Labour Economics, 2011, 18 (5), 643-655

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp3909.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Curbing cream-skimming: Evidence on enrolment incentives (2011)
Working Paper: Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives (2009)
Working Paper: Curbing cream-skimming: Evidence on enrolment incentives (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp3909

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().