AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2785 studies with locations in 138 countries.
A significant challenge to the provision of local public services such as water, sanitation, waste removal, etc. in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries the social compact, whereby citizens agree to pay taxes to fund government services that are then credibly and transparently delivered, is broken. A low willingness to pay taxes leads to low revenue collection and prevents adequate service provision, which in turn reduces willingness to pay and even leads to citizen disengagement from the state. In this project, we investigate whether strengthening the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizens’ willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and ultimately revitali...
Due to the nature of the study, we are not yet able to share any information here.
This document outlines a plan for a labor market intervention being conducted in several cities across South Africa in cooperation with the Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator. Randomly altering the curriculum of Harambee's corporate work readiness training program to include a LinkedIn (the digital professional networking site) component will allow researchers to estimate the effect of the LinkedIn "treatment" on the long-run employment outcomes, professional networks, educational investments, and career expectations and aspirations of young work-seekers in South Africa.
This study will explore whether financial incentives and reminders help improve anti-retroviral therapy (ART) adherence among HIV infected individuals. The interventions will be randomized in the study population in a cross-cutting design, with a control group, a financial incentive treatment group, a reminder phone call treatment group, and a treatment group that receives both reminder calls and financial incentives. This design allows estimation of complementarities between the two interventions. The primary outcome of interest will be adherence to ART, as measured by the medication possession ratio (MPR) over 6 months.
The Anchor Farm Model (AFM) of Clinton Development Initiatives (CDI) was established in 2008, and is designed to increase agricultural production, income and food security through promotion of the adoption of yield-enhancing integrated soil fertility management practices (ISFM) - and soybean production in particular - by smallholder farmers in central Malawi. To reach this goal, CDI disseminates production knowledge and improves farmers’ access to markets and storage. In this research study, we use the random assignment of 250 villages into various treatment arms to establish the impacts of these interventions on farmers’ welfare. Using detailed panel data, we identify the channels through which impacts take place and explore heterogeneity across households. The latter allows us to draw...
This proposed project will examine the effect of receiving permanent supportive housing services on housing, health, labor market, and criminal justice outcomes for individuals who repeatedly interact with the criminal justice system. The Frequent Users Systems Engagement (FUSE) Initiative, a new program in Franklin County, OH (Columbus), offers permanent supportive housing (PSH) to individuals with a history of many jail stays. “Frequent utilizers” of the criminal justice system are often affected by one or more adverse conditions that make it difficult to attain stability and increase the likelihood of recidivism. The County, in partnership with implementing partners and the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame, is conducting a randomize...
In Sweden, tax delinquents are treated differently depending on the size of the tax debt. The Swedish tax law postulates that a taxpayer who neglects to pay their tax debt gets reminders and have to pay sizeable interest if the debt does not exceed SEK 2,000 (approx. EUR 210). However, debts exceeding SEK 2,000 are instead handed over to the Enforcement Agency (EA), which makes a big difference. If the debt is handed over to EA one has to pay an additional fee of SEK 600 and if one does not pay the debt very quickly (including the fee), one receives a payment default, which makes it very hard to rent an apartment, get a loan or a credit card. Hence, it is a severe threat to have the debt handed over to the EA. Through this existing discontinuity we have been able to analyze the ca...
From September 2018, financial education was integrated into 4 subjects Mathematics, Me and the World, Algebra and Social Science in 350 schools of Armenia. For the next 3 consecutive years this program will be implemented in the rest of 1050 schools in tranches. Little is known about the effectiveness of financial education in schools, and to fill this gap we ran a randomized control trial to assess the effectiveness of integration of financial education in school curriculum. Specifically our research analyses the impact of this program on financial knowledge, skills and attitude. The evaluation was conducted over the course of four school year, from September 2019 to September 2022, by Central Bank of Armenia. Our experimental sample consists of the students from 2nd grade to 11th ...
In this project I study how individuals' body mass affects access to credit in Uganda. Participants are loan officers from a random subsample of banks and micro financing institutions from Kampala, Mbarara and Gulu. Loan officers are a key step in the assessment of creditworthiness: They screen prospective clients screen prospective clients and refer them to the second stage of the loan approval process; for selected loan profiles, they are also be responsible for the entire loan approval process. In either context, their evaluation is a key step in obtaining access to credit. Hence, the measures of ease of access to credit in the experiment are: a creditworthiness rating; a referral of the applicant to the next step of the loan approval process (binary) or the binary choice of granti...
There exists rich literature documenting the importance of framing and language in designing incentives for workers in firms. Experimental evidence has shown that framing manipulations that leverage loss aversion can increase worker productivity. Other studies have found that messaging with corporate social responsibility (CSR) also increases productivity while also increasing propensity of cheating. In this paper, we contribute to and synthesize these two strands of literature on worker incentives in a common setting, with experimental data. We intend to run a large-scale experiment that varies the framing and language of monetary incentive offers in messages prompting Lyft driver applicants to complete tasks in the application process. We will use this data to measure the effects on t...