There has been a proliferation of websites that warehouse instructional materials designed to be taught by teachers in a traditional classroom. While this new technology has revolutionized how most teachers plan their lessons, the potential benefits of this innovation are unknown. To present...

How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect employee performance in the public sector? We present the first experimental evidence on this question in the context of a unique policy change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of base teacher salaries. Using a large-scale...

Violence in and around schools has drawn increasing attention lately from both the public and policy makers. Despite the importance of the problem, however, research on this topic has been limited. In this paper I analyze how local violence affects high school graduation, college attendance, and...

We analyze an incentive pay scheme for educators that links educator compensation to the ranks of their students within appropriately defined comparison sets, and we show that under certain conditions this scheme induces teachers to allocate socially optimal levels of effort to all students....

Starting in the 2013-2014 school year, I conducted a randomized field experiment in fifty traditional public elementary schools in Houston, Texas designed to test the potential productivity benefits of teacher specialization in schools. Treatment schools altered their schedules to have teachers...