主讲人：Sean Sylvia（人大经院）
时间：2015年5月13日（周三）下午1:30
地点：国际经管学院会议室（诚明楼三层）
主办方：国际经济管理学院

摘要：There is growing interest in strengthening teacher incentives by tying pay to performance measures based on student achievement. Yet, while the theory concerning the design of performance incentives is well developed, there is little empirical evidence on how teachers may respond to specific design features of performance pay schemes. In particular, theoretically appealing but complex schemes may not outperform less appealing but simple schemes in practice. In this paper, we present the results of a randomized trial designed to test alternative approaches of mapping student achievement into rewards for teachers. Math teachers across 216 schools in western China were randomly assigned to participate in relative performance pay schemes in which teacher rankings were determined by one of three different methods of defining teacher output as a function of student scores on standardized exams. We find that teachers offered pay-for-percentile incentives (specifically designed to elicit effort that contributes to performance gains for all students based on theory in Barlevy and Neal, AER, 2012) outperform teachers offered two more simple schemes based on year-end class average performance levels or average gains over the course of a school year. Moreover, we find that pay-for-percentile incentives produced broad-based gains across students with different levels of baseline achievement while gains incentives led teachers to focus more on lower achieving students at the expense of higher-achieving students.