Managers’ Productivity and Recruitment in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals

Abstract

Governments face many constraints in attracting talented managers to the public sector, where high-powered incentives are often absent. In this paper, we study how a civil service reform in Chile changed the effectiveness of a vital group of public sector managers, school principals. We measure principals’ e˙ectiveness using an extension of the canonical teacher value-added model and we evaluate the effect of the reform using a dfference-in-differences approach. We find that public schools appoint more effective managers after increasing the competitiveness and transparency of their se-lection process. Our result shows that better recruitment policies can enhance service provision in the public sector, despite rigid wage schemes.

Keywords

Reference

Pablo Munoz, and Mounu Prem, “Managers’ Productivity and Recruitment in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals”, TSE Working Paper, n. 22-1303, February 2022.