Title: Introduction to the JHR's Special Issue on Designing Incentives to Promote Human Capital
Abstract: On December 17-18, 1999, the National Academy of Sciences sponsored a symposium entitled Designing Incentives to Promote Human Capital. The symposium included scholars from various fields; the majority of participants, however, were economists. Over the two days of the symposium, scholars presented eleven papers that addressed various aspects of the production of human capital. Eight of these papers appear in this special issue of the Journal of Human Resources. The original motivation for the symposium was to bring researchers from a broad range of backgrounds together to focus on key issues in human capital development. Its organization built on the observation that people doing empirical work on incentives in schools and public organizations frequently did not link their work to developments in economic theory concerning the structure of organizations and personnel policies. But, similarly, theorists often did not consider how their analysis might apply to schools and other nonprofit organizations. The symposium focused on the effects of existing institutional practices in public schools and job training programs, but several papers also considered the potential impacts of reforms. A common theme ties many of the papers together. Papers by Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke; Randall Eberts, Kevin Hollenbeck, and Joseph Stone; James Heckman, Carolyn Heinrich, and Jeffrey Smith; and Daniel Koretz all provide empirical results that document how public employees in schools and training programs respond to incentive systems. All four papers document significant links between incentives and performance. However, the papers also document what seem to be unintended consequences of the particular incentive systems under study. For example, Koretz shows that the measured achievement gains associated with some test-based accountability systems do not represent gains in knowledge that generalize across different types of exams covering the same subject matter. Teachers apparently coach students on how to take the specific test for performance assessment, and in some cases, teachers actually cheat by giving students answers and changing answers sheets. Heckman, Heinrich, and Smith explore incentive systems used within federal employment and training programs. These systems typically reward administrators based on the short-labor market outcomes of trainees, and these rewards do affect the behavior of training centers. However, when Heckman et al. examine the relationships between these short-run targets and more long run measures of employment
Publication Year: 2002
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 6
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