Monetary and non-monetary incentives for educational attainment: design and effectiveness

Abstract The use of extrinsic incentives to steer individual behavior is at the heart of economics and the effects of monetary incentives for students, parents, and teachers on educational attainment have been studied widely. However, the use of monetary incentives may be difficult to scale up because they are potentially expensive and educators and parents may be skeptical about cash for grades. Non-monetary incentives have the potential to mitigate these problems while being cost-effective in increasing educational attainment. This chapter reviews the literature on providing extrinsic, monetary and non-monetary incentives to increase educational attainment. Thereby, we focus on the design…