The Impact of Performance-Based Scholarships on Student Time Use

Using survey data from a field experiment in the U.S., this study tests
whether and how financial incentives change student behavior.

The authors find that providing post-secondary scholarships with incentives
to meet performance, enrollment, and/or attendance benchmarks induced
students to devote more time to educational activities and to
increase the quality of effort toward, and engagement with, their
studies; students also allocated less time to other activities such
as work and leisure. While the incentives did not generate impacts
after eligibility had ended, they also did not decrease students'
inherent interest or enjoyment in learning.

These results indicate that well-designed incentives can induce
post-secondary students to increase investments in educational attainment.