Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School

By Esther Duflo, Rema Hanna, Stephen Ryan. 2012

936 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use a randomized experiment and a structural model to test whether monitoring and financial incentives can reduce teacher absence and increase learning in India. In treatment schools, teachers’ attendance was monitored daily using cameras, and their salaries were made a nonlinear function of attendance. Teacher absenteeism in the treatment group fell by 21 percentage points relative to the control group, and the children’s test scores increased by 0.17 standard deviations. We estimate a structural dynamic labor supply model and find that teachers respond strongly to financial incentives. Our model is used to compute cost-minimizing compensation policies. (JEL I21, J31, J45, O15)

Subfields: Education, Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

The Econometrics of Randomized Experiments (2016, methodology): “For the Duflo-Hanna-Ryan data on the effect of teacher presence on educational achievement (Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan, 2012), this leads to Ŷ obsi = 0.5805 + 0.2154×Wi, (0.0256) (0.0308) [0.0311] [26] with the Eicker-Huber-White standard errors in parentheses and the Neyman standard error in brackets.”
Market inefficiencies and the adoption of agricultural technologies in developing countries 1 (2013, background): “For example, a randomized trial that used cameras with tamperproof date and time recordings to monitor teacher attendance reduced absences by half by decreasing monitoring costs and depersonalizing the monitoring process (Duflo et al. 2012).”
School Governance, Teacher Incentives, and Pupil-Teacher Ratios: Experimental Evidence from Kenyan Primary Schools (2012, neutral): “4% in year 2 in Muralidharan and Sundararaman (2013) and 22% after only a year in Duflo et al. (2012)).”
Teacher Quality and Learning Outcomes in Kindergarten (2016, background): “10 For example, in their analysis of school incentives in India, Duflo et al. (2012) report an attrition rate of 11 percent in the treatment group and 22 percent in the control group at mid-test; for the post-test, comparable values are 24 percent and 21 percent, respectively; in their analysis of…”
Shock-Based Causal Inference in Corporate Finance and Accounting Research (2015, background): “We are not aware of corporate finance examples, but for examples from labor economics, see, Duflo et al. (2012); Galiania et al. (2015).”
Institutional Corruption and Election Fraud: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan† (2015, background): “Our project also draws direct inspiration from work in development economics on efforts to improve transparency and accountability ( Niehaus et al. 2013; Duflo, Hanna, and Ryan 2012; Di Tella and Schargrodsky 2003; Ferraz and Finan 2008; Olken 2007; Yang 2008 .”
Incentives to teach badly: After-school tutoring in developing countries (2014, background): “For example, Chaudhury et al. (2006) and Duflo et al. (2012) have highlighted teacher absenteeism.”