I analyze changes in teacher turnover, hiring, effectiveness, and salaries at traditional public schools after the opening of a nearby charter school. While I find small effects on turnover overall, difficult to staff schools (low-income, high-minority share) hired fewer new teachers and...

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...

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...

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 test for the presence of an addictive effect of arbitration (positive state dependence) using data both from a laboratory bargaining experiment and from the field. We find no evidence of state dependence in the experimental data, and we find weak evidence of positive state dependence in the...

Important policy decisions rest on the relationship between teacher salaries and the quality of teachers, but the evidence about the strength of any such relationship is thin. This paper relies upon the matched panel data of the UTD Texas School Project to investigate how shifts in salary...

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the labor market effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform, some districts switched to flexible...

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools have higher management quality, driven by much...