Teacher's Quality in Colombia, Does Monetary Incentives Matter?

There is a broad academic debate about the relevance of economic incentives designed to increase the quality of school education. Although research analyzing the relationship between incentive and performance shows mixed results, the implementation of this type of strategy has become popular around the world. In this context, the objective of this article is to estimate the impact of the Colombian program of economic incentives, which assigns bonuses to administrative and teaching staff of public establishments that achieve a certain threshold in the Synthetic Index of Education Quality (ISCE). In this article, the program design is used to construct two identification strategies that approximate discontinuous regression and propensity score matching methods. Under certain assumptions, the implementation of these strategies shows that for the subsample of schools tested the program does not have a positive impact on the change in the scores of the Saber 3, 5 and 9 test. In fact, one year after the implementation, the non-beneficiaries improved more than the beneficiaries, and two years later no significant differences were found between the two groups. This article also discusses the theoretical approaches that guide the understanding of the results obtained and invites to deepen the research on how the programs should be designed and implemented in order to increase teaching effort and academic performance.