Hidden Teacher Effort in Educational Production: Monitoring vs. Merit Pay
Type
discussion paper
Date Issued
2005-02-01
Author(s)
Abstract
This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and convex effort costs, teacher monitoring - which is wasteful in principle - may be superior to merit pay in order to induce second-best teacher effort; optimum class size is not affected by informational deficiencies. If the government budget is exogenously fixed, optimum teacher effort may not be affordable, which is shown to make the case for monitoring activity instead of incentive pay even stronger.
Funding(s)
Language
English
Keywords
Education
moral hazard
monitoring
merit pay
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Subject(s)
Division(s)
Eprints ID
16433