The past decade has seen the emergence of numerous rigorous impact evaluations of teacher policies. This paper reviews the economic theory and empirical evidence on eight teacher policy goals: (1) setting clear expectations for teachers; (2) attracting the best into teaching; (3) preparing...

In this article, we explore whether the evaluation instruments used to recruit teachers in the national teacher hiring process in Peru are good predictors of teacher effectiveness. To this end, we estimate teacher value-added (TVA) measures for public primary school teachers in 2018 and test for...

Critics of privatization argue that poor labor force restructuring is a key concern and that governments should establish better retrenchment programs. Using new data from arandom sample of 400 companies in the world, we test competing theories about the wisdom of retrenchment programs and their...

We provide a theory of how growth, corruption, and a low-powered public-sector pay scale coexist in a stable equilibrium in the early stage of China's development. The regionally decentralized authoritarian regime of China features lower-level government officials competing for promotion to a...

This paper contributes to the teacher sorting literature by analyzing equity in the distribution of teachers in three educational systems in Latin America, with different equalization policies, teacher assignment rules, and incentives to work in disadvantaged schools: Chile, Colombia, and Peru....

We analyze the effects on teacher retention and between school mobility of a program that rewards excellence in pedagogical practice in Chile. Teachers apply voluntarily for the award and those who succeed on a set of assessments receive a 6 percent annual wage increase for up to 10 years. We...

The extensive sorting of more talented teachers into the most advantaged schools contributes to the wide socioeconomic achievement gaps in Latin America. The Chilean Pedagogical Excellence Assignment (AEP, for its Spanish acronym) is a unique program in the region that provides monetary...

A booming literature has argued that mission-based motives are a central feature of mission-oriented labor markets. This paper shifts the focus to task-based motivation and finds that it yields significantly more effort than mission-based motivation. Moreover, in the presence of significant task...

This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages. In contrast to the standard approach in the literature, we focus on domestic outsourcing as well as foreign outsourcing. By using a simple theoretical model, we argue that, if outsourcing is associated with specialization gains...