A Partial Identification Approach to Identifying the Determinants of Human Capital Accumulation: An Application to Teachers

This paper views career growth in teacher quality through the lens of human capital theory to understand the roles of on-the-job training (OJT) and learning by doing (LBD) in human capital formation. If OJT is the primary determinant of human capital, incentive pay policies could create a dynamic multitasking problem, leading teachers to reduce their human capital investments, thereby lowering future student achievement. In contrast, teacher human capital and future achievement would both increase if LBD were the dominant force. To explore this, I develop explicit bounds on components of a human capital production function allowing for both channels, which I estimate using experimental variation from publicly available data from a teacher incentive pay experiment in Kenya. I find that LBD is present and also estimate an informative upper bound on the OJT component. This suggests that dynamic multitasking, while theoretically relevant, may have limited practical significance, at least in this context.