This paper describes a series of school-based randomized trials in over 250 urban schools designed to test the impact of financial incentives on student achievement. In stark contrast to simple economic models, our results suggest that student incentives increase achievement when the rewards are...

This paper describes randomized field experiments in eighty-four urban public schools in two cities designed to understand the impact of aligned incentives on student achievement. In Washington DC, incentives were "horizontal" - provided to one agent (students) for various inputs in the...