The Applied Microeconomics & Development (AMD) Seminar Series will continue on February 21 at 12pm EST with a presentation by Petra Todd of the University of Pennsylvania. Todd will speak about the impact of three different performance incentives schemes using data from a social experiment conducted in Mexican high schools.

The paper, Aligning Learning Incentives of Students and Teachers: Results from a Social Experiment in Mexican High Schools, finds that programs that give both individual and group incentives to students, teachers, and school administrators for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests were most effective. Programs that provided incentives to students only saw smaller impacts, while programs that provided incentives to teachers only saw no impact.

The AMD Seminar Series aims to provide a forum for researchers to present top-quality applied microeconomics and development work at IFPRI. Seminars are held on the first and third Thursdays of each month at IFPRI’s Washington DC office. The series began in the spring of 2012.