Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable? Evidence from the Random Assignment of Transfer Incentives

We examine how performance changes when teachers transfer across very different school contexts.The Talent Transfer Initiative program created a rare natural experiment to study such transfers by randomly assigning low-achieving schools the ability to offer high-performing teachers at higher-achieving schools a $20,000 transfer stipend.Forecast tests show that these highperforming teachers' prior value added is only moderately predictive of their effectiveness in lowachieving schools.Using a difference-in-differences framework, we estimate that incentivizedtransfer teachers' value added dropped by 0.12 student standard deviations.This decline appears to be driven by lower match quality, negative indirect school effects, and the loss of student-specific human capital.