Jorge Rodriguez, Universidad de Los Andes

Paper: “Getting Teachers Back to School: Teacher Incentives and Student Outcomes”

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of a large-scale pay-for-performance program that attached teacher pay with measures of teaching skills. Using a unique administrative data set of over 500,000 student-teacher matches, we estimate the effect of the policy on student performance exploiting the program’s gradual roll-out in a DiD analysis. We document precise, null effects on student math and language standardized test scores. Estimating a structural model of teacher skills, effort choices, and student performance, we show that making the monetary incentives more homogeneous across teachers improves the policy’s effects on student outcomes.