Behavioral Economics of Education: Progress and Possibilities
By Adam M. Lavecchia, Heidi H. Liu, Philip Oreopoulos. Social Science Research Network, 2015
240 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Behavioral economics attempts to integrate insights from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology in order to better predict individual outcomes and develop more effective policy. While the field has been successfully applied to many areas, education has, so far, received less attention - a surprising oversight, given the field's key interest in long-run decision-making and the propensity of youth to make poor long-run decisions. In this chapter, we review the emerging literature on the behavioral economics of education. We first develop a general framework for thinking about why youth and their parents might not always take full advantage of education opportunities. We then discuss how these behavioral barriers may be preventing some students from improving their long-run welfare. We evaluate the recent but rapidly growing efforts to develop policies that mitigate these barriers, many of which have been examined in experimental settings. Finally, we discuss future prospects for research in this emerging field.
Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a35649d802fe4d9663f7fbafa7cc7c73742a13bd
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Citations in the corpus
- Nudging in education (2018, background): “Lavecchia et al. (2016) for a review of the literature on brain development.”
- Decoding ClassDojo: psycho-policy, social-emotional learning and persuasive educational technologies (2017, background): “…the field attempts to integrate research from psychology, neuroscience, and economics to help develop policies that address shortcomings in individuals’ decision-making processes, and acknowledges that ‘our brain’s architecture may lead to suboptimal outcomes’ (Lavecchia, Liu & Oreopoulos 2014: 4).”
- Using Goals to Motivate College Students: Theory and Evidence From Field Experiments (2020, unknown): “When benchmarking against the effects of financial incentives, we restrict attention to the studies listed in table 1B (postsecondary education) of the survey by Lavecchia et al. (2016) for which effect sizes are reported in standard deviations.”