AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12586 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Remote areas in low-income countries have poor access to quality healthcare. One challenge in developing state capacity in remote areas is the difficulty in attracting skilled workers (like doctors or nurses), to which a common solution is to engage less skilled workers (community health workers). A new solution is to bring higher-skilled professionals to rural areas through digital technology. Telehealth, which connects patients to qualified healthcare professionals via phone, provides a new opportunity for governments to reach remote areas with high-quality healthcare services at relatively low cost. Although the popularity of telehealth has dramatically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is to date no causal evidence of its impacts in low-income countries. ...
This research project tackles the governance challenge of getting high human capital, high integrity, representative citizens to put themselves forward for consideration as political candidates. We plan to explore potential solutions to this challenge with our partners in government and civil society in connection with the 2023 Local Council Elections in Sierra Leone. To do so we propose an initiative that would: i) identify, screen, and encourage high quality potential candidates to enter politics; and ii) share information about these potential candidates with political parties. We plan to randomize this initiative across 150 of 300 local government wards to assess impacts on the pool of aspirants, selected candidates, and elected officials. Additionally, inside the set of treated ...
This project seeks to assess how an intervention - growth mindset workshops for 5th grade teachers - impacts teachers’ ways of thinking about their own attitudes, and how these changes impact their attitudes toward students in the classroom, and, consequently, students’ results. Specifically, we would like to understand the impact of issues related to teachers’ mindsets that are particular to the context of students in vulnerable situations (such as in public schools of Rio de Janeiro municipality, Brazil). For this purpose, we ran a two-level clustered randomized experiment with treatment at the second (school) level. We randomly selected 50% of 178 candidate schools from the municipality into a treatment group and the other 50% into a control group. The randomization was done by pairi...
This project studies how individuals perceive debt-financed government spending and the factors shaping their support for it. We address three main questions: (i) What considerations and concerns do people raise when thinking about debt-financed spending? (ii) How do these concerns affect policy preferences? (iii) Are attitudes perspective-dependent, i.e. shaped by salient roles such as taxpayer or beneficiary of public goods? To answer these questions, we conduct two large-scale online surveys with representative samples from Germany. In the first survey (N=4,000), we dedicate 1,000 respondents to elicit first-order concerns through open-ended questions about arguments for or against debt-financed government spending, followed by questions on policy preferences and voting relevance....
Low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices characterize African agricultural markets, with high search costs hampering market integration in low- and middle-income countries (Berquist & McIntosh, 2021; Bergquist & Michael, 2020). Digital marketplaces could have major benefits for farmers (Berquist & McIntosh, 2021; Romero-Lopez & Ramos, 2017), but take-up remains too low for them to currently have a large effect. In this project, I will experiment with variations of targeted social media adverts to identify the key factors that drive farmers away from what should be a highly profitable novel ICT platform.
This project uses a survey experiment to shed light on the effects of future income shocks on households’ decisions within the unique context of the Canadian mortgage market. It aims to inform the effects on aggregate demand and financial stability of increases in nominal interest rates. The current Canadian context provides a unique natural experiment: over the past four years, nominal interest rates have surged from historic lows – leading to significant mortgage debt accumulation – to rapid increases due to inflation surge. Unlike the US and most of Europe, Canadian mortgage rates are typically fixed for no more than five years, resulting in substantial negative payment shocks upon renewal. Exploiting the variation in the timing and size of the shocks further allows a quasi-random ma...
This study investigates the role of information frictions in explaining why jobseekers do not fill understaffed jobs. To do so, we design a low-cost informational intervention in cooperation with a Public Employment Service in Belgium. The intervention aims at addressing potential information frictions faced by jobseekers when making decisions about training. Specifically, the intervention consists in communicating, to a random subset of recent UI recipients, information on the advantages of following a training (and searching for a job) in a shortage occupation. We then study whether directly providing this information to jobseekers by email has an impact on their likelihood of following a training in (and ultimately entering) a shortage occupation.
What is the willingness to pay for reliable electricty among rural consumers in developing countries, and how responsive is demand to changes in the price of electricity? Electrification is a major growth policy challenge for developing countries, as it requires large investments in infrastructure while consumers' and producers' willingness to pay for electricity in low income countries remains largely unknown. These challenges are exacerbated in rural areas, where potential consumers of electricity tend to be poorer and the costs of extending access to the grid higher than in urban markets. I use a randomized control trial (RCT) with customers of a pay as you go (PAYG) solar company in Rwanda and Kenya to study demand for electricity among rural consumers by randomly varying the effect...
This study examines whether recipient control over benefit timing improves outcomes in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which distributes $4 billion annually to approximately 6 million vulnerable U.S. households. Current LIHEAP implementation delivers benefits as administrator-controlled lump-sum payments, and our objective is to understand whether enabling recipients to allocate benefits across utility bills throughout the year via an energy savings account leads to improved outcomes with respect to disconnection rates, on-time payments, energy consumption, and arrearages.
Financial education is widely promoted as a tool to improve household financial outcomes, yet rigorous evidence on whether it translates into measurable improvements in credit behaviour remains limited — particularly for financially vulnerable populations and digital delivery channels. This study evaluates the causal impact of targeted financial education on credit outcomes, financial literacy, and financial wellbeing among users of a financial technology platform. The intervention is implemented as a randomized controlled trial in which eligible FinTech app users are invited to participate. Baseline data on financial capability, financial wellbeing, and socio-demographic characteristics are collected through a survey and combined with administrative credit records. Approximately 9,0...