Monetary incentives increase COVID-19 vaccinations

Funding Information: The work was supported by Danish National Research Foundation grant DNRF134 (P.C.-M.), Swiss National Science Foundation grant PZ00P1_201956 (A.N.M.), Swiss National Science Foundation grant 100018_185176 (F.H.S.), the Chazen Institute for Global Business at Columbia Business School (S.M.), Columbia Business School (S.M.), the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago (D.P.), and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (E.W.). Publisher Copyright: Copyright © 2021 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY).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.Peer reviewe