Recruitment, motivation, and retention effects of teacher performance pay

Skilled and intrinsically motivated personnel are central to state capacity, yet the capability to recruit, elicit effort from, and retain this profile of civil servants remains a challenge in many developing countries.

In this project, we ask whether performance contracts for teachers in Rwanda can affect not only the effort provided by existing teachers, but also the composition of teachers.  Using a two-tiered randomised, controlled trial that distinguishes compositional effects from effort responses of individual teachers, we evaluate the impacts of a pay-for-performance contract relative to a fixed-wage contract on applications to teaching positions, learning outcomes, and teacher retention. Results from this study will provide the first developing-country experimental evidence of the effects of performance pay on selection into the civil service, and will shed light on the possible trade-offs between skill and intrinsic motivation underlying these compositional effects.