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Teaching and Incentives: Substitutes or Complements?

James Allen, Arlete Mahumane, James Riddell Iv, Tanya Rosenblat, Dean Yang and Hang Yu

No 28976, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Interventions to promote learning are often categorized into supply- and demand-side approaches. In a randomized experiment to promote learning about COVID-19 among Mozambican adults, we study the interaction between a supply and a demand intervention, respectively: teaching via targeted feedback, and providing financial incentives to learners. In theory, teaching and learner-incentives may be substitutes (crowding out one another) or complements (enhancing one another). Experts surveyed in advance predicted a high degree of substitutability between the two treatments. In contrast, we find substantially more complementarity than experts predicted. Combining teaching and incentive treatments raises COVID-19 knowledge test scores by 0.5 standard deviations, though the standalone teaching treatment is the most cost-effective. The complementarity between teaching and incentives persists in the longer run, over nine months post-treatment.

JEL-codes: D90 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published as James Allen, Arlete Mahumane, James Riddell, Tanya Rosenblat, Dean Yang, Hang Yu, Teaching and incentives: Substitutes or complements?, Economics of Education Review, Volume 91, 2022

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