TY - JOUR AU - Muralidharan,Karthik AU - Sundararaman,Venkatesh TI - Teacher Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from India JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 15323 PY - 2009 Y2 - September 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15323.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Karthik Muralidharan Department of Economics, 0508 University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-0508 Tel: 858/534-2425 Fax: 858/534-7040 E-Mail: kamurali@ucsd.edu Venkatesh Sundararaman South Asia Human Development Unit The World Bank E-Mail: vsundararaman@worldbank.org AB - Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value. ER -