Good Things Come to Those Who (Are Taught to) Wait: Results from a Randomized Educational Intervention

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a unique educational program targeted at elementary school children of age 9 to 10 in Turkey. The program, which lasts eight weeks, uses case studies to discuss issues related to forward looking behavior, improve the ability to imagine future-selves and evaluate different contingencies arising from different actions, supplemented by classroom activities supervised by trained classroom teachers. Experimentally elicited incentivized tasks show that treated students make more patient intertemporal choices. The effect is stronger for students who were measured as present-biased in the baseline. Furthermore, we find that treated children are less likely to get low disciplinary grades at the end of the school year. Results are persisting one year after the intervention and replicate well in a different sample.