Caylee O'Connor
Graduate Student Fellowship | 2024–2025 Academic Year
Can Unconditional Teacher Salary Increases Improve Education Quality? Evidence from the Dominican Republic
Within low-and-middle-income countries, there is a large and growing body of literature which shows that teacher performance pay is effective at improving student outcomes; however, evidence on the effects of unconditional teacher pay raises is scarce and mixed. Using a recent increase in the salaries of teachers in the Dominican Republic, I study whether unconditional pay raises can change 1) the composition of individuals in the teaching profession, and/or 2) the quality of education in a country.
Caylee O'Connor, Department of Economcis
Caylee O'Connor is a fourth-year PhD student in economics at Stanford. Her main research interests lie at the intersection of development, public, and labor economics. She is primarily interested in studying how to improve access to high-quality education amongst underserved communities, as well as how to improve education quality more generally, in both the U.S. and 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.