Economics of the production of education

• Comments on the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 Paper on Education. (February 2008).

• What Education Production Functions Really Show: A Positive Theory of Education Expenditure (with Deon Filmer) Economics of Education Review 18 (2): 223-239. This paper starts from the simplest possible production economics. IF (a big if) the output of education is well proxied by the test scores used to estimate "education production functions" and IF (another big if) inputs are allocated to optimize output for a given budget then one knows that the marginal product per dollar of all inputs should be equalized. All of the the available empirical evidence suggests that this condition is not met--the marginal product per dollar of inputs at the range of application observed vary by orders of magnitude. This means that (at least) one of the two "ifs" is false. We think this is a much better way to think about issues like the huge and continuing debate over "does class size matter" or "does money matter"--obviously over some ranges they must. The right questions are "is production of the desired outputs of education optimized?" and, if not, "what are the institutional arrangements under which, if not optimal, then at least the best possible educational outcomes emerge?".

• Attracting and retaining qualified teachers in Argentina: Impact of the structure and level of compensation (with Emiliana Vegas and William Experton). The largest component of educational expenditure is teacher pay. There has been a large, and we argue, largely misguided debate about whether the level of teacher pay is "too high" or "too low" in certain countries. Using data from Argentina we argue that the entire structure of compensation is the key issue and that the structure needs to be adjusted to attract, retain, and motivate high quality teaching. We doubt that the current structure, common in many countries, in which teacher pay is exclusively linked to initial training and seniority (and neither demonstrated competencies nor performance in any way). But what is the optimal structure of teacher compensation is a wide open issue.

• Teacher Salaries in Paraguay.

• Examination of Schooling Costs in Paraguay Using School Level Data.

Applications to India

• Teacher Compensation: Can Decentralization Get India Out of the Perfect Storm? (With Rinku Murgai) (June 2006).
• Making Primary Education Work for India's Poor: A Proposal for Effective Decentralization. (with Varad Pande).
• Television interview on "Policy With Patnaik" on NDTV in India about secondary school education reforms in India.