Reproducibility package for Recruitment, Effort, and Retention Effects of Performance Contracts for Civil Servants: Experimental Evidence from Rwandan Primary Schools
Overview
This paper reports on a two-tiered experiment designed to separately identify the selection and effort margins of pay for performance (P4P). At the recruitment stage, teacher labor markets were randomly assigned to a “pay-for-percentile” or fixed-wage contract. Once recruits were placed, an unexpected, incentive-compatible, school-level re-randomization was performed so that some teachers who applied for a fixed-wage contract ended up being paid by P4P, and vice versa. By the second year of the study, the within-year effort effect of P4P was 0.16 standard deviations of pupil learning, with the total effect rising to 0.20 standard deviations after allowing for selection.
Reproducibility Package
| Name | URL |
|---|---|
| Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Repository name | URI |
|---|---|
| AEA Data and Code Repository | https://www.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/aea |
Reproducibility
Project code is written in Stata and in Matlab. Matlab scripts were run using Matlab version R2019b. Stata scripts were run on Stata 64-bit IC/16.1.
Randomization inference code takes substantial time to run, especially in the case of files 2.3 and 2.4 (calculation of RI-based confidence intervals, and to a lesser extent, p-values, is computationally intensive). This was run on a Linux cluster (Google Cloud Platform), with the SLURM workload manager used to manage parallel computing resources. This is strongly recommended for full replication.
A readme file with detailed instructions is part of the (external) reproducibility package.
Data
All data is public and contained in the (external) reproducibility package.
Description
| Author | Affiliation | |
|---|---|---|
| Clare Leaver | Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and CEPR | clare.leaver@bsg.ox.ac |
| Owen Ozier | Department of Economics, Williams College, World Bank Development Research Group, BREAD, and IZA | owen.ozier@williams.edu |
| Pieter Serneels | School of International Development, University of East Anglia, EGAP, and IZA | p.serneels@uea.ac.uk |
| Andrew Zeitlin | McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, and CGD | andrew.zeitlin@georgetown.edu |
| Agency Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Claire Cullen | RA |
| Robbie Dean | RA |
| Ali Hamza | RA |
| Gerald Ipapa | RA |
| Saahil Karpe | RA |
We thank counterparts at REB and MINEDUC for advice and collaboration and David Johnson for help with the design of student and teacher assessments. We are grateful to the three anonymous referees, Katherine Casey, Jasper Cooper, Ernesto Dal Bó, Erika Deserranno, David Evans, Dean Eckles, Frederico Finan, James Habyarimana, Caroline Hoxby, Macartan Humphreys, Pamela Jakiela, Julien Labonne, David McKenzie, Ben Olken, Berk Özler, Cyrus Samii, Kunal Sen, Martin Williams, and audiences at BREAD, DfID, EDI, NBER, SIOE, and SREE for helpful comments. IPA staff members Kris Cox, Stephanie De Mel, Olive Karekezi Kemirembe, Doug Kirke-Smith, Emmanuel Musafiri, and Phillip Okull. Leaver is grateful for the hospitality of the Toulouse School of Economics, 2018–2019. Research was conducted under Rwanda Ministry of Education permit number MINEDUC/S&T/308/2015 and received IRB approval from the Rwanda National Ethics Committee (protocol 00001497) and from Innovations for Poverty Action (protocol 1502).
2021-07
Scope and coverage
| Location | Code |
|---|---|
| Rwanda | RWA |
Disclaimer
The materials in the reproducibility packages are distributed as they were prepared by the staff of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/the World Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this event do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank, the Executive Directors of the World Bank, or the governments they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the materials included in the reproducibility package
Information on metadata
| Name | Abbreviation | Affiliation |
|---|---|---|
| Krestel | CK | World Bank |
2023-07-07
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