Measuring Quality for Use in Incentive Schemes: The Case of 'Shrinkage' Estimators

70 Pages Posted: 27 Sep 2018

See all articles by Nirav Mehta

Nirav Mehta

University of Western Ontario - Department of Economics

Date Written: August 02, 2018

Abstract

Researchers commonly “shrink” raw quality measures based on statistical criteria. This paper studies when and how this transformation’s statistical properties would confer economic benefits to a utility-maximizing decisionmaker across common asymmetric information environments. I develop the results for an application measuring teacher quality. The presence of a systematic relationship between teacher quality and class size could cause the data transformation to do either worse or better than the untransformed data. I use data from Los Angeles to confirm the presence of such a relationship and show that the simpler raw measure would outperform the one most commonly used in teacher incentive schemes.

Keywords: economics of education, empirical contracts, teacher incentive schemes, teacher quality

JEL Classification: J010, I210, I280, D810

Suggested Citation

Mehta, Nirav, Measuring Quality for Use in Incentive Schemes: The Case of 'Shrinkage' Estimators (August 02, 2018). CESifo Working Paper Series No. 7163, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3251200 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3251200

Nirav Mehta (Contact Author)

University of Western Ontario - Department of Economics ( email )

London, Ontario N6A 5B8
Canada

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
25
Abstract Views
270
PlumX Metrics