Can incentives for parents and students change educational inputs? Experimental evidence from summer school

•Combined parent and student incentives increased student attendance at a summer program.•Student-only incentives had a smaller effect on attendance than combined incentives.•These effects did not affect student's regular school year attendance or test scores.•Summer program students in the incentive group had a higher likelihood of re-enrolling in the district.

This paper examines whether incentives for parents and students can increase educational inputs, in this case, specifically, attendance. We evaluate the impact of randomly-assigned incentives for improving attendance at the summer program of a large metropolitan school district. Students were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) financial incentives for parents combined with non-financial incentives for students, (2) non-financial incentives for students (no incentives for parents), and (3) control. We find that the combination of the parent and student incentives increased the daily attendance rate by 9% and the likelihood of having perfect attendance by 63%. The student-only incentives had a smaller and statistically insignificant effect on attendance. We find little evidence that these incentives affected attendance rates or standardized test scores during the regular school year following the summer program, but we do find that they increased the likelihood of re-enrolling in the district.