Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives

Pascal Courty (), Do Han Kim () and Gerald Roger Marschke ()
Additional contact information
Do Han Kim: State University of New York, Albany

No 3909, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (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; cream-skimming; enrolment incentives; bureaucrat behavior; public organizations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H72 J33 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2008-12

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Related works:
Working Paper: Curbing cream-skimming: Evidence on enrolment incentives (2009)
Working Paper: Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives (2009)
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