Economics Seminar-"Testing the Boundaries of Social Accountability: Experimental Evidence on Devolving Authority over Government Teacher Pay to Remote Communities"

Social accountability may fail to improve public service delivery when the community has weak authority relative to the service provider. We tested incentive contracts, aimed at strengthening community authority over civil-service teachers, based on either camera-verified teacher presence or community ratings of teacher performance in remote schools in Indonesia. When combined with the former, community monitoring had the strongest and most persistent impact on student learning. The results indicate that when a principal (community) has weak authority vis-`a-vis the agent (regular teachers), increasing that authority using an incomplete but verifiable contract works better than using a more comprehensive but subjective one.