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  3. American Economic Review
  4. August 2012
  5. Pay for Percentile

Pay for Percentile

  • Gadi Barlevy
  • Derek Neal
American Economic Review
vol. 102, no. 5, August 2012
(pp. 1805-31)
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Abstract

We propose an incentive scheme for educators that links compensation to the ranks of their students within comparison sets. Under certain conditions, this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort. Moreover, because this scheme employs only ordinal information, it allows education authorities to employ completely new assessments at each testing date without ever having to equate various assessments. This removes incentives for teachers to teach to a particular assessment form and eliminates opportunities to influence reward pay by corrupting assessment scales. Education authorities can employ separate no-stakes assessment systems to track trends in scaled measures of student achievement. (JEL I21, I28, J33, J45)

Citation

Barlevy, Gadi, and Derek Neal. 2012. "Pay for Percentile." American Economic Review, 102 (5): 1805-31. DOI: 10.1257/aer.102.5.1805

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • I21 Analysis of Education
  • I28 Education: Government Policy
  • J33 Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
  • J45 Public Sector Labor Markets