Bonus pay for teachers, spatial sorting, and student achievement

Bonus pay policy for teachers in the U.S. is analyzed in this paper. We quantitatively argue that, because of the decentralized education finance system in the U.S., this policy may lead to higher teacher and household sorting across school districts. This then may lead to higher variance of achievement and lower mean achievement. Formally, we use an equilibrium political economy model of education at which households, heterogeneous in exogenously set income, and teachers, heterogeneous in exogenously set quality, are endogenously allocated across two school districts. Public education expenditures, which includes teachers’ wage payment and non-teacher related education spending, are financed through local income taxation. Income tax rate in each district is determined via majority voting. Achievement depends on the efforts chosen by teachers and non-teacher related education spending. Teacher efficiency wage per unit of quality is determined at the national teacher labor market. We first calibrate our benchmark model by matching certain statistics from the U.S. data. Then in a computational experiment, we introduce bonus pay for teachers which rises with average achievement. We find that for the recently observed level of average bonus pay (6.59% of average base salary), variance of achievement is 2.46% higher and mean achievement is 1.79% lower than the benchmark. Variance of achievement reaches its peak when average bonus pay is 14.06% and then it starts falling. Also, mean achievement always falls as average bonus pay rises.