Teachers' preferences for incentives to work in disadvantaged districts: A discrete choice experiment in Costa Rica

Valeria Lentini (), Gregorio Gimenez and Javier Valbuena

Economic Analysis and Policy, 2024, vol. 82, issue C, 831-845

Abstract: Designing incentives to attract the best teachers to low-performing schools has become a fundamental objective in educational equity. We analyze the case of Costa Rica, where the most experienced teachers usually choose to work in the countryʼs Central Region. We carried out a discrete choice experiment with a sample of 400 teachers in 52 schools, aiming to elicit their preferences to work at schools located in disadvantaged regions. The findings suggest that monetary incentives are the most effective to increase the probability of teachers accepting contracts in disadvantaged locations. In particular, economic bonuses show marginal effects between 8 % and 22 %. On the other hand, non-monetary incentives (working with highly qualified peers, direct access to supervisors of educational programs, and provision of material resources) are found to be important complements in the design of incentive packages. Combining monetary and non-monetary incentives, we obtain an acceptance rate to move to disadvantaged regions of more than 30 % of the teachers. These incentive designs are especially relevant in the educational systems of developing countries, which face high internal inequalities and strong financial constraints.

Keywords: Educational equity; Teachers’ recruitment and retention; Teachers’ incentives; Discrete choice experiment; Geographical imbalances (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S031359262400095X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecanpo:v:82:y:2024:i:c:p:831-845

DOI: 10.1016/j.eap.2024.04.014

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Analysis and Policy is currently edited by Clevo Wilson

More articles in Economic Analysis and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().