Incentives for Teacher Relocation: Evidence from the Gambian Hardship Allowance

Todd Pugatch and Elizabeth Schroeder

No 7723, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on the distribution and characteristics of teachers across schools. A geographic discontinuity in the policy's implementation and the presence of common pre-treatment trends between hardship and non-hardship schools provide sources of identifying variation. We find that the hardship allowance increased the share of qualified (certified) teachers by 10 percentage points. The policy also reduced the pupil-qualified teacher ratio by 27, or 61% of the mean, in recipient schools close to the distance threshold. Further analysis suggests that these gains were not merely the result of teachers switching from non-hardship to hardship schools. With similar policies in place in more than two dozen other developing countries, our study provides an important piece of evidence on their effectiveness.

Keywords: teacher labor markets; rural schools; Gambia; program evaluation; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I25 I28 J38 J45 J61 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review, 2014, 41, 120-136

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Journal Article: Incentives for teacher relocation: Evidence from the Gambian hardship allowance (2014)
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