The Economics of Education, 2nd Edition

Chapter 19

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

H. Schildberg-Hörisch ^a , and V. Wagner ^{b       a} University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany      ^b University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany

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 ...