Teachers' desired mobility to disadvantaged schools: Do financial incentives matter?

This paper exploits a 2018 reform of teachers' financial incentives to work in some French disadvantaged schools, and determines the role of incentives in teachers' stated preferences to move towards such schools based on this quasi-natural experiment. Using data from the internal human resource management of an educational authority, we find that most responsive teachers are less qualified, have less experience and are already working in such areas. Counterfactual simulations suggest that the policy has not hurt other disadvantaged schools, but rather induced some teachers not to remain in their current school or to opt less for regular schools.