Teacher Pay and Educational Outcomes: Evidence from the Rural Hardship Allowance in Zambia

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of unconditional teacher salary increases on teacher and student outcomes. To study the issue, we evaluate the rural hardship allowance in Zambia, which corresponds to a salary increase of 20%. This allowance is allocated to schools on the basis of a distance criterion allowing us to use a regression discontinuity design. We use administrative data from 2004 to 2015 on school, teacher characteristics and test scores. The administrative data are complemented with a telephone survey of schools close to the eligibility threshold. We find that crossing the threshold increases the share of teachers obtaining the allowance by 40%. Because of some non‐compliance with the allocation rule, our estimates are fairly imprecise. Focusing on provinces with better compliance we find some, albeit weak, evidence that the allowance increases the stock of teachers. We, however, find no effects on teacher characteristics or on student test scores.

Teacher Labor Markets in Developing Countries

“…Many countries have responded to this situation by offering bonuses for teachers in rural schools, including Peru (Alva et al 2017;Castro and Esposito 2017), Bolivia (Urquiola and Vegas 2005), the Gambia (Pugatch and Schroeder 2018), and Zambia (Chelwa, Pellicer, and Maboshe 2019). Credible causal estimates using geographical discontinuities from these studies suggest in general that bonuses of 20-30 percent of baseline salary for rural teachers are effective at recruiting more and better-qualified teachers, but effects on student outcomes are small.…”

Regional Differentiation of Teachers’ Remuneration: Problems, Trends and Prospects

“…Часть исследователей (E.A. Ханушек [3], С. Челва, М. Пеллисер, М. Мабоше [4], Т. Пугач, Е. Шредер [5], Н.Г. Типенко [6] и др.)…”

Education for Resilience: How a Combination of Systemic and Bottom-Up Changes in Educational Services Can Empower Dryland Communities in Africa and Central Asia

“…In several developing countries hardship allowances for teachers working in remote areas were introduced. However, studies exploring influence of these allowances in developing countries on school functioning and students' performance are sparse and their results remain inconclusive (Chelwa et al, 2019). Although the allowances in general decrease likelihood of teachers' emigration and increase numbers of teachers and proportion of qualified teachers in remote schools, no effect has been found so far on average student performance (Chelwa et al, 2019;Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014).…”

“…However, studies exploring influence of these allowances in developing countries on school functioning and students' performance are sparse and their results remain inconclusive (Chelwa et al, 2019). Although the allowances in general decrease likelihood of teachers' emigration and increase numbers of teachers and proportion of qualified teachers in remote schools, no effect has been found so far on average student performance (Chelwa et al, 2019;Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014). According to Pugatch and Schroeder (2014), although no effect on average student performance is observed, hardship allowances increase learning outcomes of top-performing students, simultaneously decreasing outcomes of those bottom performing, deepening the gap between them (Pugatch and Schroeder, 2014).…”