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Multitask agents and incetives: the case of teaching and research for university professors

Marta De Philippis

No 1042, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: This paper evaluates the behavioural responses of multitask agents to the provision of incentives skewed towards one task only. It studies the effects of significant research incentives for university professors on the way university faculty members allocate their efforts between teaching and research and on the way they select different types of universities. I first obtain different individual-level measures of teaching and research performance. Then, I estimate a difference in differences model, exploiting a natural experiment that took place at Bocconi University, which significantly strengthened incentives towards research. I find evidence that teaching and research efforts are substitute inputs in the professors' cost function: the impact of research incentives is positive on research activity and negative on teaching performance. The effects are driven by career concerns rather than by monetary incentives. Moreover, under the new incentive regime, lower ability researchers tend to leave universities and since teaching and research ability are positively correlated, this implies that bad teachers also tend to leave universities.

Keywords: multitasking; incentives; teaching (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J41 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cse, nep-edu and nep-hrm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Multi-Task Agents and Incentives: The Case of Teaching and Research for University Professors (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: Multitask Agents and Incentives: The Case of Teaching and Research for University Professors (2015) Downloads
Working Paper: Multitask agents and incentives: the case of teachingand research for university professors (2015) Downloads
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