The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance

Steven Levitt, John List, Susanne Neckermann and Sally Sadoff

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2016, vol. 8, issue 4, 183-219

Abstract: We explore the power of behavioral economics to influence the level of effort exerted by students in a low stakes testing environment. We find a substantial impact on test scores from incentives when the rewards are delivered immediately. There is suggestive evidence that rewards framed as losses outperform those framed as gains. Nonfinancial incentives can be considerably more cost-effective than financial incentives for younger students, but are less effective with older students. All motivating power of incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay. Our results suggest that the current set of incentives may lead to underinvestment.

JEL-codes: D03 H75 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
Note: DOI: 10.1257/pol.20130358
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (148)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20130358 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... tjn-uFcqtS7OWJflpW_1 (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... WN0xOnjwIclSBZ1n1Ht- (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: The behavioralist goes to school: Leveraging behavioral economics to improve educational performance (2013)
Working Paper: The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance (2012)
Working Paper: The behavioralist goes to school: Leveraging behavioral economics to improve educational performance (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejpol:v:8:y:2016:i:4:p:183-219

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy is currently edited by Matthew Shapiro

More articles in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().