The Effects of High Stakes High School Achievement Awards: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Josh Angrist, Victor Lavy. 2009

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Israeli matriculation certificate is a prerequisite for most postsecondary schooling. In a randomized trial, we attempted to increase certification rates among low-achievers with cash incentives. The experiment used a school-based randomization design offering awards to all who passed their exams in treated schools. This led to a substantial increase in certification rates for girls but had no effect on boys. Affected girls had a relatively high ex ante chance of certification. The increase in girls' matriculation rates translated into an increased likelihood of college attendance. Female matriculation rates increased partly because treated girls devoted extra time to exam preparation. (JEL I21, I28, J16)

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ac19978d3cc3ad501dcaaac6cf08a9b8f262649

Citations in the corpus

• The today and tomorrow of kids: Time preferences and educational outcomes of children (2011, unknown): “Angrist and Lavy (2009) found that an incentive program in Israel that paid students conditional on their performance on university entrance exams had a greater effect on girls.”
• Behavioral Economics of Education (2015, unknown): “17 Leuven et al. (2010) find that incentives had a positive effect on able students, but a negative impact on the less able students, and Angrist and Lavy (2009) find that incentives had an impact on girls, but not on boys.”
• Heterogeneous Peer Effects and Rank Concerns: Theory and Evidence (2017, unknown): “A large number of studies analyze students’ response to merit and financial incentives (Angrist and Lavy 2009, Kremer, Miguel, and Thornton 2009, Fryer 2010, Levitt, List, and Sadoff 2011, Cotton, Hickman, and Price 2014). 7The idea that rank concerns could generate peer effects dates back to at lea”
• The Behavioralist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance. NBER Working Paper No. 18165. (2012, unknown): “36Evidence on the effect of incentives by gender is mixed with longer term studies tending to find larger effects on girls (e.g. Angrist et al. 2009, Angrist and Lavy 2007) and shorter term studies finding larger effects among boys, particularly in the context of competition (Gneezy and Rustichini…”
• Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children (2013, unknown): “There is a growing body of research that examines the impacts of fi nancial incentives on various positive behaviors in school- age children (Angrist and Lavy 2009; Bettinger 2012; Kremer, Miguel, and Thornton 2009; Fryer 2011).”
• Economic incentives and social preferences: substitutes or complements? (2012, unknown): “Substantial rewards for high school matriculation in a randomized experiment in Israel had no impact on boys and little effect on girls except among those already quite likely to matriculate (Angrist and Lavy (2009)). Large and in most cases immediate cash payment in return for tested scholastic ach”
• The Schooling Decision: Family Preferences, Intergenerational Conflict, and Moral Hazard in the Brazilian Favelas (2012, unknown): “Ashraf (2009) looks at the effect of spousal observability, communication, and control on financial choices of married individuals in the Philippines.”
• Small-Sample Methods for Cluster-Robust Variance Estimation and Hypothesis Testing in Fixed Effects Models (2016, unknown): “In an analysis of a longitudinal cluster-randomized trial with 35 clusters, Angrist and Lavy (2009) observed that the BRL correction makes a difference for inferences. Despite a growing body of evidence that BRL performs well (e.g., Imbens and Kolesar 2016), several problems with the method hinder i”
• Randomization Tests Under an Approximate Symmetry Assumption (2017, unknown): “The bias correction is highlighted by Angrist and Pischke (2008, page 320) and is used by Angrist and Lavy (2009) without the degrees of freedom adjustment.”
• Parent-Child Information Frictions and Human Capital Investment: Evidence from a Field Experiment (2020, unknown): “[6] Angrist, Joshua D.”
• Do Differences in School's Instruction Time Explain International Achievement Gaps in Maths, Science and Language? Evidence from Developed and Developing Countries (2010, unknown): “J, P. Lang, and P. Oreopoulos, 2009, Angrist and Lavy, 2009), teachers’ incentives (Lavy, 2009).”