Working Paper: NBER ID: w21835
Authors: Hugh Macartney; Robert McMillan; Uros Petronijevic
Abstract: While incentive schemes to elicit greater effort in organizations are widespread, the incentive strength-effort mapping is difficult to ascertain in practice, hindering incentive design. We propose a new semi-parametric method for uncovering this relationship in an education context, using exogenous incentive variation and rich administrative data. The estimated effort response forms the basis of a counterfactual approach tracing the effects of various accountability systems on the full distribution of scores. We show higher average performance comes with greater score dispersion for a given accountability scheme, and that incentive designs not yet enacted can improve performance further, relevant to education reform.
Keywords: Incentive Design; Education; Accountability Systems; Empirical Analysis
JEL Codes: D82; I21; J33; M52
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| NCLB (H52) | educator effort (I24) |
| educator effort (I24) | student test scores (I21) |
| higher incentive strength (M52) | educator effort (I24) |
| NCLB (H52) | student test scores (I21) |