@article{ba84a3ccf45848e9905259e16ced4e0b,
title = "Who Has the Time? Community College Students{\textquoteright} Time-Use Response to Financial Incentives",
abstract = "We evaluate the effect of performance-based scholarship programs for post-secondary students on student time use and effort and whether these effects are different for students we hypothesize may be more or less responsive to incentives. To do so, we administered a time-use survey as part of a randomized experiment in which community college students in New York City were randomly assigned to be eligible for a performance-based scholarship or to a control group that was only eligible for the standard financial aid. This paper contributes to the literature by attempting to get inside the “black box” of how students respond to a monetary incentive to improve their educational attainment. We find that students eligible for a scholarship devoted more time to educational activities, increased the quality of effort toward and engagement with their studies, and allocated less time to leisure. Additional analyses suggest that students who were plausibly more myopic (place less weight on future benefits) were more responsive to the incentives, but we find no evidence that students who are arguably more time constrained were less responsive to the incentives.",
keywords = "D03, Educational investment, Financial aid, Higher education, I20, Incentives, J24, Time use",
author = "Lisa Barrow and Rouse, {Cecilia Elena} and Amanda McFarland",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Eric Auerbach, Elijah de la Campa, Ross Cole, Laurien Gilbert, Ming Gu, Steve Mello, Lauren Sartain, and Ini-Abasi Umosen for expert research assistance; Leslyn Hall and Lisa Markman Pithers with help developing the survey; Reshma Patel for extensive help in understanding the MDRC data. Orley Ashenfelter, Alan Krueger, Jonas Fisher, Derek Neal, Reshma Patel, Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, and Shyam Gouri Suresh as well as seminar participants at Cornell University, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Harvard University, Michigan State, Princeton University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Virginia provided helpful conversations and comments. This paper was also presented by Cecilia Rouse as the Presidential Address at the 88th International Atlantic Economic Conference in Miami, 17-20 October 2019. Some of the data used in this paper are derived from data files made available by MDRC. We thank the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Princeton University Industrial Relation Section for generous funding. The authors remain solely responsible for how the data have been used or interpreted. Any views expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors are ours. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2020, International Atlantic Economic Society.",
year = "2020",
month = mar,
day = "1",
doi = "10.1007/s11293-020-09649-3",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "48",
pages = "35--52",
journal = "Atlantic Economic Journal",
issn = "0197-4254",
publisher = "Springer Netherlands",
number = "1",
}