IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34819.html

Financial Incentives, Health Screening, and Selection into Mental Health Care: Experimental Evidence from College Students in India

Author

Listed:
  • Emily Breza
  • Kevin Carney
  • Vijaya Raghavan
  • Kailash Rajah
  • Thara Rangaswamy
  • Gautam Rao
  • Frank Schilbach
  • Sobia Shadbar
  • James Stratton

Abstract

In an RCT with college students in Chennai (N=340), we test how modest financial incentives and personalized feedback affect the uptake and targeting (by symptom severity) of free therapy. Despite 56% of students screening positive for at least mild depression or anxiety, only 3% in the control group took up therapy. A small cash incentive increased appointments by 9 percentage points (p = 0.06) on average without substantially affecting targeting. Personalized feedback and recommendations based on a mental health screening tool significantly improved targeting while keeping overall take-up largely unchanged. Combining these two treatments achieved both higher take-up and improved targeting, by increasing appointments among symptomatic individuals by 21 pp (p

Suggested Citation

  • Emily Breza & Kevin Carney & Vijaya Raghavan & Kailash Rajah & Thara Rangaswamy & Gautam Rao & Frank Schilbach & Sobia Shadbar & James Stratton, 2026. "Financial Incentives, Health Screening, and Selection into Mental Health Care: Experimental Evidence from College Students in India," NBER Working Papers 34819, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34819
    Note: DEV EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34819.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34819. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.