AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2205 studies with locations in 124 countries.
We are sending letters to potential rental income debtors living in six of the most affluent districts in Peru. These letters contain messages referring to social norms (informing that most of their neighbors pay their taxes), civic duty (informing why is it important to pay taxes), enforcement actions taken by the tax authority, and a reminder (i.e. control group). A sample of 9,024 individuals was randomly assigned to receive one of these types of messages four times, during a period of four months. The objective is to estimate and compare the effects of the first three types of messages on tax compliance. In contrast to most of the literature, we are carrying out an endline survey to evaluate the mechanisms that underpin the observed behavioral responses.
We are interested in documenting gender gaps in Ethiopia by observing the administrative sector at a large University and decomposing factors that may contribute to the wage (and position) gap using institutional data. We propose to rigorously explore two potential explanations for the gender gap: 1) whether the evaluation of potential job candidates are a function of the candidate's gender, and 2) whether following advice is a function of the gender of the advisor.
We run a follow-up study for the registered field experiment "The Welfare Effects of Information Nudges - Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment" (RCT ID: AEARCTR-0002814). In a brief 3-question survey we test how our different informational treatments have affected consumer beliefs and whether the change in beliefs is associated with a change in purchasing behavior.
A small body of the recent literature in economics analyzes how the negative welfare effects of behavioral biases can be countered by taxes. While there is an ongoing debate about whether governments should address behavioral biases by taxes or nudges (e.g. sugar taxes vs. food labels), little is known about how these policy tools perform relative to each other. One challenge for such a comparison is the limited evidence of how nudges affect choices and welfare. We intent to contribute to this question by analyzing the welfare effects of information nudges. A particular feature about most of the information nudges employed in the real world is that they only coarsely inform consumers about the relevant topic. We model information nudges as noisy signals that coarsely inform consumer...
Recent debate has identified important gaps in the understanding of intertemporal risks. Critical to closing these gaps is evidence on which dimension of intertemporal risk –the risk or the time–is evaluated first. Though under discounted expected utility this ordering is of no consequence, under discounted non-expected utility models the order of evaluation is critical. We provide experimental tests in which different orderings of evaluation generate different predictions for behavior. We find more support for the notion that the risk dimension is evaluated first.
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.
In Sierra Leone, early childbearing and teenage pregnancy is one of the most pervasive problems affecting the health, social, economic and political progress and empowerment of women and girls. Of all pregnancies, 34% occur amongst teenage girls (SLDHS 2008) and 40% of maternal death occur as a result of teenage pregnancy (MICS 2010). This study evaluates BRAC's Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) program, designed to socially and financially empower teenage girls by providing safe spaces for them to socialise and receive mentoring and life skills training. With networks of these girls' clubs active in five countries, BRAC combines this approach with financial literacy training, offering customized microloans that contribute to their social and financial independence. Th...
The Training for Productivity (TFP) project aims to improve the Ghanaian Civil Service’s capacity by designing, implementing and evaluating novel individual and group-based training methods for bureaucrats. The training programs will be experimentally implemented as part of a standard package of training sessions coordinated by the Office of the Head of Civil Service (OHCS) and the Civil Service Training Centre (CSTC) of Ghana. The project findings will feed directly into the work of the OHCS, which requested the project and with whom we are working closely. As the trainings are being delivered by Civil Service personnel and through existing training systems, the research findings will have external validity and it will be straightforward to scale-up and sustain them.
The Child Development Grants Programme (CGDP) will pilot a cash transfer programme that will focus on removing the food security and financial barriers to improving nutrition. The programme will operate in rural areas of two states in Nigeria: Jigawa and Zamfara. By providing cash to poor women, it is expected that the programme will enable them to buy more and better quality food and also to spend money on education and health. The project, which will be implemented by Save the Children (SC) and Action Against Hunger (ACF) will provide a child development grant (CDG) of approximately 3,500 Naira (£14) a month to mothers, from the time they are confirmed to be pregnant until the child is two years old. The design of the evaluation is such that there will be a control group, a firs...
Teaching children to read is one of the most important school functions, but many students leave school without adequate reading skills. Intervening early may imply that at-risk students need not experience long periods of school failure, and, if problems can be prevented, early interventions could be more efficient than later interventions. This project studies a program targeting students in kindergarten and first grade, who have or are at-risk of developing reading difficulties. The program combines a focus on phonemic awareness and phonics, small-group or one-to-one tutoring, and multi-sensory learning methods. The intervention is evaluated with a randomized field experiment in 12 Swedish schools. Schools select those among their students that are most in need of extra help, who are...