Team Incentives for Education in Developing Countries: A Randomized Field Experiment in Benin

Abstract

I examine the impact of student incentives in Benin, using three different designs that can be implemented relatively cheaply and with administrative data. The first design is a standard incentive structure where students receive monetary rewards for reaching a performance target. In the other two designs, teams of four students receive incentives based on either their performance level as a group or in a team tournament scheme. I find a large and similar average treatment effect across designs, ranging from 0.27 to 0.34 standard deviations (Standard errors do not allow to rule out that the three designs are equally effective). (JEL C93, D82, I21, I28, O15)