Dismantling the Honorarium Trap: Asymmetric BOSP Fiscal Caps, Teacher Redistribution, and Student Cognitive Achievement in Indonesia's Underdeveloped Regions: Evidence from K-Means and Quantile Regression

Abstract

Fiscal decentralization through the School Operational Assistance (BOSP) grant gives schools in Indonesia's frontier, outermost, and underdeveloped (3T) regions wide discretion over spending, yet the composition of that spending is rarely linked to learning. This study aims to describe BOSP allocation patterns, identify fiscal typologies of schools, and examine how component level spending is associated with student cognitive achievement across the achievement distribution. The design is observational and cross sectional. Merged administrative records for the 2024 fiscal and academic year were drawn from ARKAS, Dapodik, and the Academic Potential Test (TKA), with the school as the unit of analysis, covering 855 public and private senior high schools in 62 underdeveloped regencies. K-Means clustering segmented the schools into a resilient group of 62 schools, an intermediate group of 454 schools, and a vulnerable group of 339 schools, while quantile regression estimated associations at five quantiles of the TKA distribution. Spending on learning activities is positively associated with TKA scores in the lower and upper middle quantiles, whereas the honorarium share interacted with private ownership shows a negative association only at the highest quantile. The results suggest that spending composition, rather than budget volume alone, is associated with cognitive achievement in remote schools.