Simon Burgess - Understanding the Response to Financial and Non-Financial Incentives in Education: Field Experimental Evidence Using High-Stakes Assessments

Title: Understanding the Response to Financial and Non-Financial Incentives in Education: Field Experimental Evidence Using High-Stakes Assessments

Abstract: We analyze the impact on high-stakes assessments of incentivizing students’ effort, in a field experiment with over 10,000 students. We contribute to the literature by incentivizing effort rather than performance, by using high-stakes exams, and by comparing financial and non-financial rewards. We find little average impact of incentives in the overall population. We exploit our large sample and rich data to explore heterogeneity using machine learning techniques, and identify a “right tail”.  On average in the upper half of the distribution of effectiveness, scores improve by 10%-20% of an SD, about half the attainment gap between poor and non-poor students.

Presenter: Simon Burgess, University of Bristol

The program coordinator of these seminars is Arezou Zaresani. If you would like to subscribe to the Melbourne Institute Seminar Series email list, please contact Arezou.