AEA RCT Registry currently lists 10284 studies with locations in 170 countries.
The consumer bankruptcy system provides significant benefits to high-debt individuals, yet fewer than 2% of US adults file each year. We propose a randomized control trial to answer two questions: (i) which factors are important deterrents to obtaining debt relief through bankruptcy, and (ii) how does bankruptcy impact financial outcomes? We hypothesize that bankruptcy improves financial outcomes and that key barriers include: (a) misperceptions about bankruptcy benefits and (b) fear of credit-score impacts. Testing these hypotheses, we will survey up to 10,000 high-debt individuals. We will elicit perceptions of facts about bankruptcy and provide information about bankruptcy to correct misperceptions. By exogenously shifting beliefs about bankruptcy along dimensions (a) and (b), we wil...
Project Connect is a comprehensive home visitation intervention that targets child welfare-involved, substance-affected families with children and adolescents ages 0 to 17 through home-based services and treatment. The program addresses the complex needs of families affected by substance use by providing intensive, long-term services aimed at strengthening families, addressing parental substance use, and helping parents recover while keeping children safe. The study used a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the causal impact of Project Connect services on families experiencing substance use in the Rhode Island child welfare system and to compare the child welfare service trajectories (e.g., placement and length of time in care) of families affected by substance use who r...
This project will create a dataset consisting of the children of individuals who themselves previously benefited from a randomized health (deworming), vocational education, and/or cash grant intervention. The project will exploit experimental variation to estimate the causal impact of these earlier programs on the health, cognitive development, and other outcomes of the recipients’ children, overcoming the key methodological problem of confounding. The project will survey approximately 7,000 children aged 3-8 of the 7,500 respondents in the Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS), creating the new KLPS-Kids dataset, to estimate the extent to which these programs can help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Note that a pilot version of this trial was previously registered as AEA ...
Lab experiment to investigate individual preference for getting information generated by AI and the explanation of how the AI made that prediction. The experiment is done in a real-stakes decision where a Black-Box AI informs a decision to allocate an actual US$10, 000-loan.
Most of the poor receive their income in cash and they seem to readily spend it instead of saving some of it. Offering commitment devices to overcome present bias or sending reminders to tackle inattention and forgetfulness only seem to yield modest improvements. In particular, usage levels of formal savings account usually remain low. What if the act itself, depositing the cash into the account or handing it over to the loan officer is associated with non-monetary costs that prevents individuals from saving? Based on a literature that shows reduced spending levels when cash is the means of transaction, I hypothesize that a "cash-in-hand" effect also exists for savings, i.e. individuals become attached to their cash and are reluctant to 'give it away' to save it. I test this hypothesis ...
We propose to analyse the impact of a Community Driven Development program on social preferences, specifi cally on attitudes towards inequality and inequity and preferences for participatory decision-making. We exploit the implementation of a randomized control trial which offers to rural Bangladeshi communities the opportunity to build a public source of safe water and requires them to take collective decisions within a public consultation process over key features of the project. We designed an innovative lab-in-the- eld experiment in order to elicit preferences toward redistribution and participation. Players participate to face-to-face group discussions to decide how to allocate a common endowment among themselves, with and without the requirement of contributing to its creation. In...
A recent literature emphasizes the role of workers’ preferences for flexibility in explaining the prevalence of self-employment or casual work over wage-work in developing countries. While flexibility is an important job attribute for workers, flexible work arrangements may not always work for firms, particularly in settings that demand greater coordination among worker tasks (e.g, team production). In this project, I study the impact of regular labor supply and increased worker coordination on worker and firm level productivity in the context of a large apparel manufacturing cluster in India. The status quo work arrangement in these firms is that workers (tailors) choose their own work timings, despite clear gains to both workers and firms of coordinating work times. Such flexibility s...
A widespread concern exists regarding social media contributing to political polarization. Social media sites, by promoting the creation of “echo chambers” (situations in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside closed systems), are believed to distort the salience of some beliefs and perceptions, potentially leading to polarized views. However, given that signing-up in a social network is not mandatory, a valid argument is that the presence of polarization patterns documented in social networks may arise in part because of their users being particularly prone to polarization. In other words, patterns observed in social networks may be simply the consequence of self-selection. Disentangling the magnitudes of these effects --polarization effectivel...
Youth unemployment remains a significant challenge in developing countries. Digital bootcamps have emerged as a potential solution, offering intensive, short-term training in advanced digital skills. However, their effectiveness is largely untested. This paper aims to investigate the causal impacts of the Jóvenes Bicentenario program in Peru, which provided free digital skills bootcamps to disadvantaged young individuals. To do so, we utilize an individual-level randomized controlled trial, which was embedded during the applications to the program. To assess the impacts of the program, we will use government administrative records merged with our experimental sample. Specifically, we will use the Planilla Electrónica (PE), the Peruvian matched employer-employee dataset. The PE is a ...
In the prototypical contingent valuation survey, respondents are tasked with voting for or against a government program that improves an environmental amenity (Arrow et al., 1993). Researchers then vary the size of the one-time tax funding the program and use the resulting vote shares to trace out demand for the environmental amenity. In this study we start by reviewing the theoretical underpinnings of this exercise and the challenges advanced by critics. We then propose a new model of respondent behavior that incorporates concerns for the environmental amenity and social image. Through the lens of this model, earlier work challenging the contingent valuation methodology is explained and demand for the environmental amenity is still recoverable. We then adapt the contingent valuation su...