Does increasing teacher salaries improve student test scores?

Over at Development Impact, I just posted a piece — What do we learn from increasing teacher salaries in Indonesia? More than the students did — where I discuss recent work by de Ree et al. on an impressive policy experiment, where Indonesia doubled base pay for many civil service teachers.

Here’s the abstract of their paper:

How does a large unconditional increase in salary affect the performance of incumbent employees in the public sector? We present experimental evidence on this question in the context of a policy change in Indonesia that led to a permanent doubling of teacher base salaries. Using a large-scale randomized experiment across a representative sample of Indonesian schools that accelerated this pay increase for teachers in treated schools, we find that the large pay increase significantly improved teachers’ satisfaction with their income, reduced the incidence of teachers holding outside jobs, and reduced self-reported financial stress. Nevertheless, after two and three years, the increase in pay led to no improvement in student learning outcomes. The effects are precisely estimated, and we can rule out even modest positive impacts on test scores. Our results suggest that unconditional pay increases are unlikely to be an effective policy option for improving the effort and productivity of incumbent employees in public-sector settings.