Caylee O'Connor

Graduate Student Research Funding | 2022 - 2023 Academic Year

Can Unconditional Salary Increases Improve Education Quality? Evidence from the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic (DR) is a country which has historically invested little in education, and its educational outcomes and teacher quality have reflected this lack of investment. Since the election of former President Danilo Medina in 2012, however, spending on teachers' salaries has increased significantly through a sequence of unconditional pay raises. There is a large literature within economics which studies the impact of performance pay on students' educational outcomes, but little work which looks at the effects of unconditional pay raises. Using administrative data, I will study whether these raises changed the composition of teachers and/or led to changes in the quality of education in the DR.

Caylee O'Connor, Department of Economics

Caylee O'Connor is a third-year PhD student in economics at Stanford. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of development, public, and labor economics, specifically within the realm of education and its interaction with labor market outcomes in low-and-middle-income countries. Prior to joining the PhD program, O'Connor was a pre-doctoral research assistant for Professor Melanie Morten at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). O'Connor holds bachelor's degrees in math and economics from the University of Alabama.

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