The Misallocation of Pay and Productivity in the Public Sector : Evidence from the Labor Market for Teachers
This paper uses a unique dataset of both public and private sector primary school teachers and their students to present among the first estimates in a low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher value added (TVA) and its correlate...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/565311493912180970/The-misallocation-of-pay-and-productivity-in-the-public-sector-evidence-from-the-labor-market-for-teachers http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26502 |
| Summary: | This paper uses a unique dataset of both
public and private sector primary school teachers and their
students to present among the first estimates in a
low-income country of (a) teacher effectiveness; (b) teacher
value added (TVA) and its correlates; and (c) the link
between TVA and teacher wages. Teachers are highly effective
in our setting: Moving a student from the 5th to the 95th
percentile in the public school TVA distribution would
increase mean student test scores by 0.54 standard
deviations. Although the first two years of experience, as
well as content knowledge, are associated with TVA, all
observed teacher characteristics explain no more than 5
percent of the variation in TVA. Finally, there is no
correlation between TVA and wages in the public sector
(although there is in the private sector), and a policy
change that shifted public hiring from permanent to
temporary contracts, reducing wages by 35 percent, had no
adverse impact on TVA, either immediately or after 4 years.
The study confirms the importance of teachers in low income
countries, extends previous experimental results on teacher
contracts to a large-scale policy change, and provides
striking evidence of significant misallocation between pay
and productivity in the public sector. |
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