Leaver, Clare et al   <br/><br/>
Recruitment, effort, and retention effects of performance contracts for civil servants: Experimental evidence from rwandan primary schools 

 - The American Economic Review  
 - 111(7), Jul, 2021: p.2213-2246 
<br/><br/> 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. – Reproduced