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

Autor/inn/en	Breza, Emily; Carney, Kevin; Raghavan, Vijaya; Rajah, Kailash; Rangaswamy, Thara; Rao, Gautam; Schilbach, Frank; Shadbar, Sobia; Stratton, James
Institution	National Bureau of Economic Research
Titel	Financial Incentives, Health Screening, and Selection into Mental Health Care. Experimental Evidence from College Students in India.
Quelle	Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research (2026) PDF als Volltext (1); PDF als Volltext (2) Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Reihe	NBER working paper series. w34819
Beigaben	Illustrationen
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; Monografie; Graue Literatur
DOI	10.3386/w34819
Schlagwörter	Psychische Krankheit; Gesundheit; Psychotherapie; Arbeitspapier; Student; Indien
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 ( 0.01) without affecting uptake by asymptomatic individuals. These findings suggest that low-cost incentives coupled with screening information can effectively increase uptake while allocating limited mental health care resources to those with greater need.
Erfasst von	ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Kiel
Update	2026/3