Incentive Design in Education: An Empirical Analysis

Hugh Macartney, Robert McMillan and Uros Petronijevic

No 21835, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: While incentive schemes to elicit greater effort in organizations are widespread, the incentive strength-effort mapping is difficult to ascertain in practice, hindering incentive design. We propose a new semi-parametric method for uncovering this relationship in an education context, using exogenous incentive variation and rich administrative data. The estimated effort response forms the basis of a counterfactual approach tracing the effects of various accountability systems on the full distribution of scores. We show higher average performance comes with greater score dispersion for a given accountability scheme, and that incentive designs not yet enacted can improve performance further, relevant to education reform.

JEL-codes: D82 I21 J33 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-hrm
Note: CH ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21835.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:21835

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21835

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().