The impact of incentivizing training on students’ outcomes

This paper studies the effect on students’ scores of incentivizing in-service teacher training in a system that conditions teacher promotions to in-service training take-up. In Ecuador, teachers need to pass a compulsory knowledge test with a minimum score and undergo substantial training to qualify for a promotion. We use a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of incentivizing in-service teacher training on students’ scores on a standardized national university entrance exam. We find that in-service training significantly improves students’ verbal test scores by 0.19 to 0.31 standard deviations (depending on the selected comparison window).