AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11945 studies with locations in 170 countries.
While much attention has been dedicated to the health and well-being of children under 5, the needs of older children have been historically overlooked. However, children between 5- and 14-years face health-related challenges higher than previously realized, during a period of life critical for physical, psychological, cognitive and social development. In Zambia, the context for this study, the prevalence of malaria is highest in children aged 5-17, with 40% of children testing positive in endemic areas; a study based in Lusaka, the capital also reported high levels of morbidity in primary school children, with 35% reporting febrile symptoms in the past two weeks, 66% reporting cough, 25% reporting diarrhea, and 32% having worms in their stool. Many of these problems are caused or compo...
Previous research has shown randomising the language of public goods games leads to significantly different contribution levels for bilingual subjects. However, the mechanism is not well understood. In the first paper described here we will measure norms and expectations, testing each as candidate mechanisms. Do bilingual people contribute more in one language because they feel they should, expect others to do so, or have internalised certain behaviours? This has direct relevance for bilingual subjects (the majority of the world) as well as shedding light on the importance of frames for revealed preferences. In addition to testing mechanisms, this experiment will act as a robustness check on Clist & Verschoor (2017, JDE), by examining the same question in a new (urban) setting. In a...
In collaboration with a large charitable organization, we conduct a large-scale field experiment designed to investigate the role of group identity for individual donation decisions in a natural setting. In particular, we test the hypothesis that perceived group membership in combination with group competition have the potential to increase charitable giving. The intervention takes place in July 2021. In addition to the main research question, the project aims at shedding light on (I) whether it needs explicit incentives for salient group membership to have a positive effect on individual donation decisions, (II) whether public recognition as a group-level incentive can increase charitable giving, and (III) whether potential effects of group identity on charitable giving can be further...
In collaboration with a large charitable organization, we conduct a large-scale field experiment designed to investigate the role of group identity for donation decisions in a natural setting. In particular, we test the hypothesis that perceived group membership has the potential to increase charitable giving. The interventions takes place in June and July 2021. In addition to the main research question, the project aims at shedding light on (I) whether it needs explicit incentives for salient group membership to have a positive effect on individual donation decisions, (II) where to locate the appeal to be most effective, and (III) whether effects of group identity on charitable giving can be further exploited by a supplementary peer-to-peer fundraising method. After approximately twelv...
We study fiscal accountability in a laboratory election environment in which candidates compete over a full fiscal platform consisting of a budget and its allocation between a public good and private rents. The theory predicts that more disproportional power-sharing rules raise the electoral stakes of winning and therefore discipline rent extraction. The experiment is designed to test five hypotheses. First, greater power-sharing disproportionality should reduce corruption, increase public-good provision, and improve aggregate voter welfare. Second, if voters behave fully rationally, human voters should not differ from automated utility-maximizing voters. Third, explicit disclosure of rents should not matter when voters can infer rents from the budget constraint. Fourth, greater disprop...
This research project aims to understand to what extent information about a financial product, when provided either to men or women, affects spouses’ beliefs and attitudes towards the financial product, product purchase decisions, and intra-household information sharing, cooperation and conflict outcomes. We conduct a randomized controlled trial among 3100 pastoral households in Kenya and Ethiopia. We randomize, at the household-level, the gender of the spouse that receives information about an index insurance and savings financial product through video interventions. Additionally, we cross-randomize whether or not the household member that is targeted with information can directly share the information with their spouse, by requesting the intervention team to also show the video to the...
In recent years, Ethiopia has experienced a significant increase in conflicts, leading to the death and displacement of millions of people, destruction of essential infrastructure worth billions of dollars, and exacerbation of human rights violations. This can be attributed to ethnic prejudice, stemming largely from historical tensions between different ethnic groups. Misinformation about ethnic groups on social media; the current ethnic-based federal structure; and the manipulation of historical grievances by those seeking political gain have exacerbated existing prejudicial attitudes and behaviors. This study examines the host family program (HFP) at the University of Gondar leveraging an experimental design to evaluate the impact of intergroup contact facilitated by the program on pr...
We collaborate with Trip.com to pilot a "Flexible Personal Leave" policy within the firm: Employees may optionally apply for additional unpaid personal leave without providing specific justification, subject to completed work handover (unpaid leave, benefits unchanged, pilot cap: 45 days/year per person). Trip wants to introduce this as they believes it will attract employees and improve retention as many employees will find this extremely valuable. We aim to assess the take-up and effects of this policy, in particular, how take-up varies across demographics, employee seniority and position, etc., and how the policy affects worker productivity and promotion, firm recruitment and retention, etc.
This is a follow-up to our initial preregistration with identifier AEARCTR-0015630. We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. In our initial experiment we had three treatment conditions that varied whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. We observed that receivers reacted heterogeneously to informed advice. In this follow-up, we investigate mechanisms behind the observed heterogeneous effects.
While experimental evidence supports the effectiveness of parenting interventions, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based parenting interventions on caregivers and children remains understudied. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether AI-assisted parenting guidance can improve caregivers’ parenting mental health, stress, and self-efficacy, as well as early childhood developmental outcomes in rural China. In a pre-existing center-based parenting program in rural China, we randomly assign 20 centers (over 1000 registered caregiver-child dyads) to treatment and control arms. In the treatment centers, caregivers are encouraged to use an AI application integrated with a comprehensive curriculum covering six domains on early childhood development: psychological development, nutrit...