Individual teacher incentives and student performance

This paper is the first to systematically document the relationship between individual teacher performance incentives and student achievement using the United States data. We combine data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey on schools, students, and their families with our own survey conducted in 2000 regarding the use of teacher incentives. This survey on teacher incentives has unique data on frequency and magnitude of merit raises and bonuses, teacher evaluation, and teacher termination. We find that test scores are higher in schools that offer individual financial incentives for good performance. Moreover, the estimated relationship between the presence of merit pay in teacher compensation and student test scores is strongest in schools that may have the least parental oversight. The association between teacher incentives and student performance could be due to better schools adopting teacher incentives or to teacher incentives eliciting more effort from teachers; it is impossible to rule out the former explanation with our cross sectional data.     

违约责任中适用非财产损害赔偿探讨

非财产损害赔偿有别于精神损害赔偿，其含义国内外学者表述不一，但对违约责任下非财产损害的救济，两大法系的立法与判例均给予了一定认可。伴随着交易的不断复杂，违约产生的非财产损害纠纷在我国日渐彰显。为保证交易的公正，我国有必要在现有合同立法体系中补充完善关于非财产损害赔偿的规定。     

TEACHER LOCATION CHOICE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF QUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM NEW YORK CITY

This article studies the distribution of teacher quality measures across the New York City school system. Because teachers are paid along a fixed salary schedule and they have the option to transfer schools, this analysis measures the degree to which environmental factors affect teacher location choice. Both school-based and neighborhood-based effects are measured, and both types are significant. Furthermore, this article finds that the location of the school in relation to the suburban borders is an important determinant of teacher location choice. (JEL I29 , J24 , J61 )     

Student demographics,school working conditions,and teacher mobility

I analyse how the inclusion of working condition data influences the estimated marginal effects of student demographics on teacher mobility. Using detailed administrative data on public schools, combined with unique data describing teachers’ perceptions of working conditions, I estimate a model characterizing the multinomial outcomes of teachers choosing to work at different schools. By comparing the estimated marginal effects of student characteristics with and without incorporating detailed working conditions, I find that excluding these additional data results in overestimating the effect of student characteristics on the probability a teacher moves to a different school, but has no influence on estimated effects for the probability of leaving teaching altogether.     

Solving the global warming problem: beyond markets,simple mechanisms may help!

This paper discusses the feasibility and performances of simple mechanisms to implement international environmental agreements in the multilateral externalities context of global warming. Asymmetric information and voluntary participation by sovereign and heterogeneous countries are key constraints on the design of those agreements. Mechanisms must prevent two sorts of free‐riding problems – free riding in effort provision and free riding in participation. As markets might fail to solve simultaneously those two problems, we construct instead a simple menu of options that trades off the provision of incentives for participating countries and the provision of incentives to participate. With such a mechanism, all countries voluntarily contribute to a fund, although at different intensities, but only the most efficient ones effectively reduce their pollution below its ‘business as usual’ level.     

Efficiency,access, and the mixed delivery of health care services

Universal health systems often rely on both pubic provision and contracting arrangements with private hospitals. This paper studies the optimal mix of public and private provision of health care services. We propose a model in which the regulator acts as athird-party payer, and aims to ensure universal access to treatment at minimal cost. Patients need one unit of medical services and differ in the severity of illness. A private and a public hospital are available. Under incomplete contracts, ownership affects the regulatory constraints and the power of managerial incentives. Only the private manager internalizes profits, and has incentives to reject costly patients and to exert effort in cost reduction. Contracting with the private hospital is optimal when managerial effort is relatively effective in reducing costs. By using the public hospital as a last resort provider, the regulator can ensure access, provide incentives to the private manager, and internalize part of the resulting cost savings. Imposing a no-dumping constraint on the private hospital reduces the power of incentives and is not always optimal.     

The Welfare Effects of Incentive Schemes

This paper computes the change in welfare associated with the introduction of incentives. We calculate by how much the welfare gains of increased output due to incentives outweigh workers' disutility from increased effort. We accomplish this by studying the use of incentives by a firm in the check-clearing industry. Using this firm's production records, we model and estimate the worker's dynamic effort decision problem. We find that the firm's incentive scheme has a large effect on productivity, raising it by 12% over the sample period for the average worker. Using our parameter estimates, we show that the cost of increased effort due to incentives is equal to the dollar value of a 5% rise in productivity. Welfare is measured as the output produced minus the cost of effort; hence, the net increase in the average worker's welfare due to the introduction of the firm's bonus plan is 7%. Under a first-best scheme, we find that the net increase in welfare is 9%.     

Advertising and labour supply: why do Americans work such long hours?

This paper advances the view that the intensity of creation of wants through advertising and marketing might be an influence on decisions made by Americans about how much time they should devote to paid work and how much time to leisure. In exploring this argument, we employ vector auto‐regression analysis to estimate long‐run supply schedules for US workers in the twentieth century. We find that advertising expenditure is significant in determining US hours of work, thus providing support for the hypothesis that preferences over work–leisure choices are malleable and are manipulated by the marketing effort.     

How and Why Has Teacher Quality Changed in Australia?

International research suggests that differences in teacher performance can explain a large portion of student achievement. Yet little is known about how the quality of the Australian teaching profession has changed over time. Using consistent data on the academic aptitude of new teachers, we compare those who have entered the teaching profession in Australia over the past two decades. We find that the aptitude of new teachers has fallen considerably. Between 1983 and 2003, the average percentile rank of those entering teacher education fell from 74 to 61, while the average rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. We find that two factors account for much of the decline: a fall in average teacher pay (relative to other occupations) and a rise in pay differentials in non‐teaching occupations.     

Grades as incentives

This paper examines how grade incentives affect student learning across a variety of courses at two universities, using for identification the discrete rewards offered by the standard A–F letter-grade system. We develop and test five predictions about the provision of study effort and the distribution of numerical course averages in the presence of the thresholds that separate these discrete rewards. Surprisingly, all are rejected in our data. There is no evidence that exam performance is improved for those students that stand to gain the most from additional study.     

The impact of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement: Evidence from within-teacher within-student variation

Teachers differ greatly in how much they teach their students, but little is known about which teacher attributes account for this. We estimate the causal effect of teacher subject knowledge on student achievement using within-teacher within-student variation, exploiting a unique Peruvian 6th-grade dataset that tested both students and their teachers in two subjects. Observing teachers teaching both subjects in one-classroom-per-grade schools, we circumvent omitted-variable and selection biases using a correlated random effects model that identifies from differences between the two subjects. After measurement-error correction, one standard deviation in subject-specific teacher achievement increases student achievement by about 9% of a standard deviation in math. Effects in reading are significantly smaller and mostly not significantly different from zero. Effects also depend on the teacher-student match in ability and gender.     

Racial/ethnic match and student–teacher relationships

This paper explores the role of teacher race/ethnicity in the teacher-perceived relationships with kindergarten and early elementary school students. Employing a model with both student and teacher fixed effects, we discover a positive link between the racial/ethnic match and the teacher-reported relationships with students. Specifically, minority students tend to have closer relationships with their teachers when they are taught by a minority teacher. Our analyses also provide suggestive evidence that the effects on the teacher–student relationships could not be driven by differential racial discrimination between white and minority teachers. Particularly, white and minority teachers are not differentially biased in judging their relationships with minority students, implying that the source of the racial/ethnic interaction effects is likely to come from the role modeling of behaviors. Given the importance of the relationships between young children and nonparental adults in their early stages of life, these findings have crucial policy implications.     

The labor supply of fixed-wage workers: Estimates from a real effort experiment

Fixed-wage workers comprise the bulk of the labor force and yet little is known about how they respond to changes in their wage. Given recent interest in theories of reciprocity and intrinsic motivation and their implications for effort provision, the neoclassical prediction seems less obvious today. To better understand the motivation of these workers, I estimate their labor supply using a real effort experiment. Two results stand out. First, no one theory seems to fit the pooled data. On average, people work considerably harder than the minimum but they do not respond to changes in the wage. Second, pooling the data is deceptive because there seem to be distinct types with differing responses to the wage. Most workers can be classified as reciprocal or intrinsically motivated and, indeed, these types respond as theory would predict: reciprocators return wage gifts with increased effort and extrinsic incentives crowd out motivation for intrinsic workers.     

Do Not Trash the Incentive! Monetary Incentives and Waste Sorting

In this paper, we examine whether combining non‐monetary and monetary incentives increases municipal solid waste sorting. We empirically investigate this issue, exploiting the exogenous variation in waste management policies experienced during the years 1999–2008 by the 95 municipalities in the district of Treviso (Italy). Using a panel regression analysis, we estimate that pay‐as‐you‐throw (PAYT) incentive schemes increase the sorted‐to‐total waste ratio by 17 percent, and that their effect reinforces that of a door‐to‐door (DtD) collection system, which is equal to 15.7 percent. Moreover, the panel structure of our dataset allows us to find learning and spatial effects associated with both PAYT and DtD.     

DO TAX CUTS ENCOURAGE RENT SEEKING BY TOP CORPORATE EXECUTIVES? THEORY AND EVIDENCE

This paper explores the role of tax policy in shaping incentives for executive effort (labor supply) and rent seeking within the firm. We develop a theoretical model that distinguishes between effort and rent‐seeking responses to income taxes, and provides a framework to estimate a lower bound for the rent‐seeking response. Using executive compensation and governance data, we find that rent seeking represents an important component of the response to changes in tax rates, especially among executives in firms with the worst corporate governance. (JEL D31, G30, H21)     

The supply of qualified nurses: a classical model of labour supply

The need to ensure adequate numbers of nurses is a key requirement of the current modernization of the UK NHS. However, it is unclear how effective wages are as an instrument to maintain or increase the nursing workforce, both in terms of absolute numbers and in the number of whole time equivalents. This study sets out to estimate a classical model of labour supply for British qualified married or cohabiting nurses and midwives, looking at both the participation decision and the hours of work supplied. Data are from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey over the years 1999–2000. Participation and hours of work are found to be inelastic with respect to own wage. These results suggest that increasing the wage would only have a moderate effect on labour supply. Interestingly, there is no significant statistical difference between having a child of nursery age (3–4) and having a child of school age (5–15) on participation and hours supplied. This suggests that recent policy initiatives to increase female labour force participation, through the provision of free nursery places, has been successful. Preliminary analysis of a split private and public sector sample suggests that hours supplied are completely inelastic with respect to wages in the public sector.     

Strive to be first or avoid being last: An experiment on relative performance incentives

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first, avoid being last, or both. We find that the combined tournament contract incorporating both incentives at the top and at the bottom induces the highest effort, especially in larger groups. Avoiding being last produces the lowest variance of effort and is more effective at motivating employees compared to competing for the top.     

DOES TEACHER‐FAMILY EXPERIENCE AFFECT TEST SCORES?

Since families play a pivotal role in elementary schools, student learning may be influenced by how well the teacher knows a family and how well the parents know the teacher. We test this hypothesis by evaluating whether assignment to a teacher who has previously taught an older sibling affects test scores. We refer to teachers who have previously taught the older sibling as having “teacher‐family experience” when teaching the younger sibling. Using a novel data set that includes administrative data on students and teachers matched to family identifiers, we find that when the older sibling's teacher is teaching in the younger sibling's grade, 40% of younger siblings are assigned their older sibling teachers. We find that teacher‐family experience does not have any significant effects on test scores and we can statistically rule out small effects. (JEL I20)     

Training and worker effort: a signalling perspective

Abstract This paper analyzes the interaction between firms’ investment in general skills training and workers’ incentives. It shows that when a firm has an informational advantage over its workers, its provision of free general skills training can serve as a signal that there will be a long‐term relationship between the firm and its workers. This signal induces the workers to exert more effort in learning firm‐specific skills, which enhances the firm's profits. In contrast with most of the existing literature, the model implies that firms may provide free general skills training even if there is no labour market friction.     

Incentive roles of fringe benefits in compensation contracts

The purpose of this paper is to establish a new insight into the potential benefit of fringe benefits used by firms in compensation contracts. We show that fringe benefits have a role to provide incentives and reduce agency costs. In an agency model with moral hazard, we examine the optimal incentive package that involves salary, equity shares, and fringe benefits. Based on the notion that fringe benefits are imperfect substitutes for salary and (weakly) complementary to effort, we show how the optimal package may include an excessive provision of fringe benefits that exceeds the first-best level, and why it involves a distortion towards overconsumption of fringe benefits in terms of the manager's preferences.