Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India

We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher performance pay program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of 2 years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Muralidharan, Karthik, Sundararaman, Venkatesh
Format: Journal Article
Language:EN
Published: 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4789
Description
Summary:We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher performance pay program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. At the end of 2 years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.27 and 0.17 standard deviations in math and language tests, respectively. We find no evidence of any adverse consequences of the program. The program was highly cost effective, and incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.