Working Paper: NBER ID: w20918
Authors: Jonathan Guryan; James S. Kim; Kyung Park
Abstract: For whom and under what conditions do incentives work in education? In the context of a summer reading program called Project READS, we test whether responsiveness to incentives is positively or negatively related to the student’s baseline level of motivation to read. Elementary school students were mailed books weekly during the summer, mailed books and also offered an incentive to read, or assigned to a control group. We find that students who were more motivated to read at baseline were more responsive to incentives, suggesting that incentives may not effectively target the students whose behavior they are intended to change.
Keywords: incentives; education; reading; motivation
JEL Codes: I21; J24
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Incentives (M52) | Reading behavior (Y50) |
| Baseline motivation (C51) | Responsiveness to incentives (D11) |
| Incentives (M52) | Reading volume (A30) |
| Reading volume (A30) | Reading comprehension test scores (Y10) |
| Incentives + Appropriate books (M52) | Reading comprehension scores (Y10) |
| Intrinsic motivation (O31) | Effectiveness of incentives (M52) |