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Portrait of Erik Wengström. Photo.

Erik Wengström

Professor, Director of Doctoral studies, Department of Economics

Portrait of Erik Wengström. Photo.

Monetary incentives increase COVID-19 vaccinations

Author

  • Pol Campos-Mercade
  • Armando N Meier
  • Florian H Schneider
  • Stephan Meier
  • Devin Pope
  • Erik Wengström

Summary, in English

Stalling COVID-19 vaccination rates threaten public health. To increase vaccination rates, governments across the globe are considering using monetary incentives. We present evidence on the effect of guaranteed payments on COVID-19 vaccination uptake. We ran a large pre-registered randomized controlled trial (N = 8,286) in Sweden and linked the data to population-wide administrative vaccination records. We found that modest monetary payments of $24 (SEK 200) increased vaccination rates by 4.2 percentage points (p = 0.005), from a baseline rate of 71.6%. In contrast, behavioral nudges increased stated intentions to vaccinate but had only small and not statistically significant impacts on vaccination rates. The results highlight the potential of modest monetary incentives to increase vaccination rates.

Department/s

  • Department of Economics

Publishing year

2021-10-07

Language

English

Pages

879-882

Publication/Series

Science (New York, N.Y.)

Volume

374

Issue

6569

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Topic

  • Economics

Keywords

  • COVID-19
  • vaccination
  • Monetary incentives

Status

Published

Research group

  • Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1095-9203