Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field Experiment

Roland G. Fryer, Jr., Steven D. Levitt, John List and Sally Sadoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2022, vol. 14, issue 4, 269-99

Abstract: In a field experiment, we provide financial incentives to teachers framed either as gains, received at the end of the year, or as losses, in which teachers receive up-front bonuses that must be paid back if their students do not improve sufficiently. Pooling two waves of the experiment, loss-framed incentives improve math achievement by an estimated 0.124 standard deviations (σ), with large effects in the first wave and no effects in the second wave. Effects for gain-framed incentives are smaller and not statistically significant, approximately 0.051σ. We find suggestive evidence that the effects on teacher value added persist posttreatment.

JEL-codes: C93 I21 I28 J32 J45 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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DOI: 10.1257/pol.20190287

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