Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India

Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman

No 15323, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.

JEL-codes: C93 I21 M52 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-exp, nep-lab and nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (36)

Published as Karthik Muralidharan & Venkatesh Sundararaman, 2011. "Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 119(1), pages 39 - 77.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India (2011)
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:15323

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323

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 ().