Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives
50 Pages Posted: 19 Jan 2009
There are 2 versions of this paper
Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives
Curbing Cream-Skimming: Evidence on Enrolment Incentives
Abstract
Can enrolment incentives reduce the incidence of cream-skimming in the delivery of public sector services (e.g. education, health, job training)? In the context of a large government job training program, we investigate whether the use of enrolment incentives that set different 'shadow prices' for serving different demographic subgroups of clients, influence case workers' choice of intake population. Exploiting exogenous variation in these shadow prices, we show that training agencies change the composition of their enrollee populations in response to changes in the incentives, increasing the relative fraction of subgroups whose shadow prices increase. We also show that the increase is due to training agencies enrolling at the margin weaker members, in terms of performance, of that subgroup.
Keywords: performance measurement, cream-skimming, enrolment incentives, bureaucrat behavior, public organizations
JEL Classification: H72, J33, L14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
By James J. Heckman, Jeffrey A. Smith, ...
-
The Performance of Performance Standards
By James J. Heckman, Carolyn Heinrich, ...
-
The Performance of Performance Standards
By James J. Heckman, Carolyn Heinrich, ...
-
An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Performance
By Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke
-
An Empirical Investigation of Gaming Responses to Explicit Performance Incentives
By Pascal Courty and Gerald Marschke
-
By Steven Kelman and John N. Friedman
-
Targeting Labour Market Programmes: Results from a Randomized Experiment
By Stefanie Behncke, Markus Frölich, ...
-
Effort as Investment: Analyzing the Response to Incentives
By John N. Friedman and Steven Kelman