group of schools within the Public Private Partnership program (PPP) in Uganda. Under the program, the government offers a per‐student subsidy to participating private schools.<sup>11</sup>

**Sample Selection and Data** : The study targets all Junior Secondary 2 teachers (equivalent to Grade 8) – 350 teachers in total ‐ in 30 secondary PPP schools. It was carried out during the 2012‐2013 expansion of the PPP program to newer schools. Out of a list of 200 private schools which applied to the PPP program in 2012, 100 schools were randomly selected to receive the PPP program in 2013. Out of these 100 schools, we randomly selected 30 schools as the sample for this study.<sup>12</sup> These schools were visited in November 2014, approximately 22 months after these schools started participating in the PPP program. All our data come from this unannounced field visit and include information from a self‐administered teacher survey, information from teacher attendance records maintained by the head teacher, and teacher observation by enumerators.

**Experimental Design** :  The study relies on a randomized survey experiment wherein detailed self‐ administered questionnaires were filled by teachers. Teacher questionnaires contained 62 questions and took about 90 minutes in total. They contained four sections: (i) teacher characteristics, (ii) school characteristics, (iii) self‐reported effort, and (iv) subjective assessment. The subjective assessment module contained questions related to perceptions about ability and effort, student engagement, support structures, and job‐satisfaction.

To uncover potential self‐perception biases, the framing of the subjective assessment module was randomized within schools. Teachers within each school were randomly divided, into two groups – in the control group the respondent was asked to provide information about him/herself. We call this the ‘self‐assessment’ group. In the treatment group, the respondent was asked to provide information about ‘most other teachers in the school’: we call this the ‘social‐assessment’ group.

This study design yields the following: (i) average teacher perceptions about self and average teacher perceptions about other teachers in the school, (ii) average ‘divergence’ between teachers’ self‐ and social‐assessments around each question in the subjective assessment module (25 questions in total). Positive divergence on a specific dimension implies that on average, teachers see themselves more favorably than the other teachers in the same school on that dimension. Systematic divergence indicates what we call High Relative Self‐Regard (HRS) among teachers. Note that we do not observe HRS for any individual teacher, because any given teacher receives only one of the subjective assessment modules – self‐ or social‐assessment.<sup>13</sup> However, we can observe HRS at the level of the school.

> 11 The PPP program in Uganda targets all registered and certified private schools charging 75,000 UGX per term or lower. Under the partnership, private schools apply to the Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) to enter into a contractual arrangement for enrolling eligible low‐income students in return for a per‐student government subsidy of 47,000 UGX per term per student.

> 12 The sample draws from a broader study on the PPP program (Barrera et al 2016).

> 13 Both social‐ and self‐ surveys were not administered to the same teacher to reduce social desirability bias in survey responses.

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