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Working Papers
“Teacher Behavior under Performance Pay Incentives” Abstract: Over the last decade many districts have implemented performance pay incentives to reward teachers for improving student test scores. Economic theory suggests that these programs could alter teacher work effort, cooperation, and retention. Because teachers can choose to work in a performance pay district that has characteristics correlated with teacher behavior, I use the distance between a teacher’s undergraduate institution and the nearest performance pay district as an instrumental variable. Using data from the 2003 and 2007 waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), I find that teachers respond to performance pay incentives by working six percent fewer hours per week at school. Performance pay also decreases participation in unpaid cooperative school activities, but it does not increase teacher turnover. The treatment effects are heterogeneous; male teachers respond more positively to performance pay than female teachers. Using Florida as a case study, I find that individual-level incentives appear to increase teacher effort and turnover compared to school-level incentives.
Abstract:
Proponents of teacher performance pay argue that financial incentives not only motivate veteran educators to put forth more effort and work harder, but also that performance pay operates on teacher selection by attracting higher quality candidates into the teacher workforce—candidates who might otherwise select more lucrative careers outside of public education. We investigate this latter claim. In doing so, we find that school districts that implemented teacher performance pay secured new teachers from universities with incoming SAT scores that were 30 points higher than those teachers in similar school districts where teacher pay was based exclusively on a single-salary schedule absent any pay differentiation based on performance. Using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), we use propensity score matching (PSM) to match school districts that implemented performance pay plans with districts that were otherwise similar in political culture, demographics, and student and teacher characteristics.
Abstract:
This paper empirically examines commercialization of university faculty inventions through startup firms from 1994 through 2008. Using data from the Association of University Technology Managers and the 2010 NRC doctoral rankings, our research reveals several findings. We find that university entrepreneurship is more common in bad economic times and that engineering department quality and biological sciences department size are more important after the NASDAQ stock market crash in 2000. We also find that the quality of a biological sciences department is positively associated with startup company activity. Conditional on creating one startup, each additional TTO employee significantly increases university startups.
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Michael Jones • 434 Flanner Hall • Notre Dame, IN • 46556 • mjones12@nd.edu |
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