Satchel, uniform, bonus Lecture notes

Presentation title
20 August 2011
8
Roland Fryer
involving 38,000 students who went to state-run schools in New York, Chicago, Dallas and Washington, DC. In each city about half the participating schools were randomly selected to be ones where students received money; their progress was then compared with that of their peers in the other schools.
Presentation title 20 August 2011 3
A bit of details
Marginal students: are those for whom certification is “within reach” in the sense that adjustments in test-taking strategy or study time are likely to have a pay-off Pairing: to improve treatment-control balance, the project used a matching strategy that paired treatment and control schools based on lagged values of the 1999 Bagrut rate
Business and Economics
Satchel, uniform, bonus
A/Prof. He-ling Shi Clayton Campus 20 August 2011
Pay-for-performance
Pay students directly for performance Why?
Presentation title 20 August 2011 7
Major findings
Sample with separated boys and girls
– The estimates for boys are uniformly small and negative (none are significantly different from zero) – 0.022 – The estimates for girls are on the order of 0.10, and most are at least marginally significantly different from zero
– pupils may fail to invest enough time and effort into education because the gains—better jobs and higher incomes—are nebulous and distant – Cash payments, on the other hand, reward good performance immediately
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20 August 2011
5
Cross-section estimates
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20 August 2011
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Major findings
For combined sample of boys and girls
– The OLS estimate with school control only is 0.056 – The OLS estimate with school controls, lagged score quartiles, and individual controls is larger and more significant at 0.067. – Conclusion: The treatment-control difference in Begrut rates in 2001 is at least in part explained by a chance association between treatment status and student characteristics in that year
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20 August 2011
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Technique – LATE effects
local average treatment effects (LATE) – is the estimated difference in outcomes between students who participate in participating schools and those in non-participating schools who would have participated if given the chance.
Expectation: Test scores should increase and drop-out rates decline
Presentation title 28th February 2011 2
Joshua rist and Victor Lavy
high-school students in 40 Israeli schools where few pupils went on to get their school-leaving certificate (the Bagrut). In half the schools students were offered a chance to earn nearly $1,450 if they passed all the tests and got the certificate. found that completion rates in “payment schools” increased by about a third—but only for girls and mainly for those who needed to do only a tiny bit more to graduate.
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20 August 2011
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Technique – ITT effect
Intent-to-treat (ITT) effects, i.e. differences between treatment and control group means The ITT is an average of the causal effects for students in schools who were randomly selected for treatment at the beginning of the year and students in schools that signed up for treatment but were not chosen. In other words, ITT provides an estimate of the impact of being offered a chance to participate in a financial incentive program.
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20 August 2011
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The econometrics model
Individual i at school j
Weighted average test scores
Treatment dummy
School-level controls
Individual characteristics
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20 August 2011
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Probe 1: Investment incentives
If students lack sufficient motivation, dramatically discount the future, or lack accurate information on the returns to schooling to exert optimal effort, providing incentives for achievement will yield increases in student performance.
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20 August 2011
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Two experiments
Experiment 1: Pupils in New York and Chicago were paid for test scores or grades – output based Experiment 2: The children in Dallas and Washington, DC, were paid for specific tasks, like reading books or wearing uniforms – input based
Presentation title 20 August 2011 15
Technique – TOT effect
“Treatment-on the-Treated” (TOT) effect, measures the average effect of being in a school which was assigned treatment for participating students.