Original source
Subjective versus Objective Incentives and Employee Productivity (2022)
Research manuscript
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Used in these cards
Evaluation-Induced Gender Bias
"When manager evaluations affect employees' raises, we find male teachers receive 10% higher evaluations controlling for a rich set of teacher actions and student outcomes. When evaluations are only used for feedback, but do not have a financial stake, we see no difference in evaluation score by gender."
High-Frequency Managerial Observation
"Teachers in our sample spend much more time directly observing teachers. They do about twice the number of classroom observations each year (4.7 versus 2.5 in the US)."
Incentive-Driven Pedagogical Distortion
"Teachers under the objective incentive contract have a more negative class climate and less student-centered lessons. Both see a decrease of around 0.1 pts."
Managerial Evaluation Accuracy Gate
"We find there is no effect of subjective performance pay on student test scores for managers who are in the top quintile of this inaccuracy measure."
Managerial Goal-Setting Alignment
"On average, moving from the 50th percentile value added to the 90th percentile value added would increase a teacher's subjective rating by 0.7sd."
Multi-Task Moral Hazard Trade-off
"Objective incentives negatively affect student socio-emotional development, including a significant decrease in love of learning and an increased likelihood students say they want to change schools. Subjective incentives result in a small positive effect on overall socio-emotional skills."
Pay-for-Percentile Tournament Contract
"Both treatments are within-school tournaments and have the same distribution of raise thresholds. These similarities allow us to isolate the effort response from just changing the performance metric... Both contracts increase test scores by 0.09 sd."
Perceived Contract Noise
"Using this instrument for noise, we find that a 1 SD increase in the perceived noisiness of the contract decreases hours worked by 13 and decreases student test scores by 0.2 SD."
Remedial Curriculum Transfer
"Given that we find similar if not larger effects on these types of questions, it appears that treatment effects are coming from actual learning as opposed to memorizing curriculum."
Subjective Attendance Motivation
"Relative to a control group mean of 145 days, subjective teachers are present an additional 6 days."
Systematic Grade Audit Protocol
"10% of all teacher's exams were regraded. If the teachers' grade and the auditor's grade were off by more than 5%, another 10% of their tests were audited... Overall, grade manipulation was small... There was no heterogeneity in grading accuracy by treatment."