Justin Sandefur presented his paper Outsourcing Service Delivery in a Fragile State: Experimental Evidence from Liberia at the 8th NCID Research Workshop. Two salient features important at this project were the low enrollment and the backlog of overage children. The experiment was to outsource education to private management of public schools. 93 schools were randomly selected and managed by 8 private contractors with staffed teachers on government payroll. Did the schools improve their efficiency? Yes, there were learning gains from this outsourcing progra...
It’s always possible to do it better in a (big or small) business, and it’s important knowing specifically how. Logical starting point: realizing that the situation is not going well or that at least is improvable. But, how do you know you can do it better?
Trying to answer that question is the base of Julia Seither’s paper Keeping Up with the Joneses: Ranking Effects on Effort, Cooperation, and Firm Performance. “The idea is that people do care about how they are standing relative to others and they want to keep up with their peersâ€, said Julia, who ...
If you are born in the U.S. and your son goes to a public primary school, certainly he will go to a class with 10 to 25 fellow students. This teacher to student radio does only happen in 3 out of 10 schools in India, where ratios can go as up as one teacher per 80 students in 10% of the schools. This misallocation of teachers portrays later in educational outcomes, which could be improved if a better distribution of teachers would be done.
These are the results of the investigation Misallocation of State Capacity? Evidence from Two ...