Estimating the Effect of Leaders on Public Sector Productivity: The Case of School Principals

Gregory F. Branch, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin

No 17803, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.

JEL-codes: H4 I2 J4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: CH ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (88)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17803.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:17803

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17803

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 ().