CAREER: Using Information and Incentives to Promote Human Capital

该项目研究如何利用信息和激励措施增加对弱势群体的健康和教育投资。 它开发了一种方法，其基础是更好的信息和适当的奖励将导致更好的健康和教育投资决策。 然后，这个模型被用来研究政策的有效性，以诱导糖尿病患者锻炼，政策，以减少阿片类药物成瘾，并研究选择父母是否投资更多的天才儿童的教育或投资平等地在他们所有的孩子的教育时，资源紧张。 这项研究的结果将适用于几个重要的政策问题，包括减少糖尿病流行;解决美国的阿片类药物流行;以及改善美国和世界各地的教育投资。 其他研究人员将利用本项目开发的方法研究其他政策问题。 研究结果可能有助于美国公民的福祉，特别是穷人和世界各地的人。这项CAREER研究使用四个项目来开发有关激励设计的新见解，并在健康行为和教育投资的背景下对其进行测试。第一个项目进行后续RCT的早期项目，以测试是否个性化的激励合同提高了效率。 第二个项目进行随机对照试验，以评估两种激励计划：激励禁欲的"投入”和“结果”。 第三个进行了实地实验，以确定父母的偏好外生不同的回报投资于他们的孩子的教育，让PI量化的权重父母放在最大限度地提高投资回报（家庭总收入），均衡他们的孩子的成果（个人收入），并均衡的投入给每个孩子。 项目4采用随机对照试验设计，以测试儿童在年满18岁时将没有资格接受SSI的知识是否会促使他们在教育方面投入更多资金。 该研究项目的成果将大大有助于经济学家了解如何最好地设计激励计划。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

This CAREER project studies how to use information and incentives to increase investment in health and education among disadvantaged populations. It develops a method based on the idea that better information and appropriate rewards will result in better decisions about health and education investments. This model is then used to study the effectiveness of policies to induce diabetic patients to exercise, policies to reduce opioid addiction, and to study choices parents make regarding whether to invest more in their gifted child's education or invest equally in all their children's education when resources are tight. The results of this research will be applicable to several important policy questions, including reducing the diabetes epidemic; addressing the opioid epidemic in the US; and improving educational investments in the US and around the world. The methods developed in this project will be used by other researchers to study other policy issues. The results could contribute to the wellbeing of US citizens, especially among the poor and people around the world.This CAREER research uses four projects to develop new insights about incentive design and tests them in the context of healthy behaviors and investment in education. The first project conducts a follow-up RCT on an earlier project to test whether personalizing incentive contracts improves efficacy. The second project conducts an RCT to evaluate two incentive schemes: incentivizing ``inputs" and incentivizing ``outcome" of abstinence. The third conducts a field experiment to identify parental preferences by exogenously vary returns to investing in their children's education, allowing PI to quantify the weights parents place on maximizing the returns to investment (total household earnings), equalizing their children's outcomes (individual earnings), and equalizing the inputs given to each child. Project 4 uses an RCT design to test whether knowledge that children will be ineligible to receive SSI when they turn 18 will induce them to invest more in education. The results of this research project will significantly contribute to economists' knowledge of how best to design incentive schemes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.