When student incentives do not work: Evidence from a field experiment in Malawi

Teaching and incentives: Substitutes or complements?

“…Demand-side educational interventions seek to increase the perceived returns to learning. In school settings, studies have examined impacts of providing information on the wage returns to schooling (Jensen, 2010), merit scholarships based on test performance (Kremer et al, 2009;Berry et al, 2019), or incentives for test performance (Angrist and Lavy, 2009;Levitt et al, 2011;Fryer, 2011;Behrman et al, 2015;Burgess et al, 2016;Fryer, 2016;Hirshleifer, 2017). Outside of school settings, studies have evaluated incentive-based strategies such as cash payments, deposit contracts, lotteries and non-cash rewards to promote healthy behaviors (Finkelstein et al, 2019), but do not target learning outcomes.…”

How does salient information on economic prospects shape human capital investments?

“…Although, for example, Rodríguez-Planas (2012) and Oswald and Backes-Gellner (2014) argue for performance bonuses for participants, BEB program was designed without any kind of financial rewards for participation. While incentives do not guarantee program success (Berry, Kim, and Son, 2022), the absence of (financial) incentives is at least partially reflected in the 50% program dropout rate of BEB. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows.…”