Essays on the Economics of Education
type: CreativeWork
description: My thesis consists of three chapters on the Economics of Education. In the first chapter, I take a structural approach to studying the extent to which teacher behavior and teacher interactions with students determine teaching contribution to test score growth in the classroom. Teachers’ contributions may differ across classrooms, as it may depend on the types of students taught and because teachers may adjust their effort to new contexts. The estimated model suggests that teacher and student efforts play a significant role in determining student knowledge. My findings indicate that teachers who are effective in teaching low-performing students may not be as effective in teaching high-performing students. In a counterfactual, I assigned teachers assessed as highly effective, according to value-added estimates, to classrooms with a high proportion of low-achieving students. The results suggest that the value-added measures overstate the expected performance of certain teachers in the reassigned classrooms. Additionally, I quantify the benefits of reassigning teachers based on their comparative advantages, effort choices, and endowments. Compared to the assignment based on the value-added specification, the new reassignment produces higher gains for the low-performing students. In my second chapter, I estimate the potential gains of paying teachers according to varying, optimally-designed linear schemes. The empirical literature considers a variety of schemes that have been evaluated under randomized controlled trials. However, there is little evidence about their relative performance. To better understand these mechanisms behind the schemes' performance, I use a publicly-available dataset from a teacher incentive experiment in Andhra Pradesh, India, containing both individual- and group-based piece-rate bonuses. I exploit the experimental nature of the data to test for the presence of peer pressure in the group-based scheme. I first document the existence of peer pres…
abstract: My thesis consists of three chapters on the Economics of Education. In the first chapter, I take a structural approach to studying the extent to which teacher behavior and teacher interactions with students determine teaching contribution to test score growth in the classroom. Teachers’ contributions may differ across classrooms, as it may depend on the types of students taught and because teachers may adjust their effort to new contexts. The estimated model suggests that teacher and student efforts play a significant role in determining student knowledge. My findings indicate that teachers who are effective in teaching low-performing students may not be as effective in teaching high-performing students. In a counterfactual, I assigned teachers assessed as highly effective, according to value-added estimates, to classrooms with a high proportion of low-achieving students. The results suggest that the value-added measures overstate the expected performance of certain teachers in the reassigned classrooms. Additionally, I quantify the benefits of reassigning teachers based on their comparative advantages, effort choices, and endowments. Compared to the assignment based on the value-added specification, the new reassignment produces higher gains for the low-performing students. In my second chapter, I estimate the potential gains of paying teachers according to varying, optimally-designed linear schemes. The empirical literature considers a variety of schemes that have been evaluated under randomized controlled trials. However, there is little evidence about their relative performance. To better understand these mechanisms behind the schemes' performance, I use a publicly-available dataset from a teacher incentive experiment in Andhra Pradesh, India, containing both individual- and group-based piece-rate bonuses. I exploit the experimental nature of the data to test for the presence of peer pressure in the group-based scheme. I first document the existence of peer pres…
author: Luccioni, Enrique Martin
language: en_ca
keywords: Teacher Effectiveness, Educational Policy Design, Achievement Gaps, Optimal Contracts
date published: 2022-10-03
date modified: 2026-07-27T21:56:05Z
provider: Western University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: The University of Western Ontario

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/32479