AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1279 studies with locations in 106 countries.
Our research seeks to understand the impact of increasing workers’ input and participation in decision-making within a firm on outcomes, including productivity, retention and well-being. We are working with an automobile manufacturing firm in China on a set of randomized field experiments with production line workers and their managers. We propose two experimental designs. The first looks at the effects of empowering workers by giving them more choice in determining their own compensation scheme. The second experiment looks at managerial compensation and its intersection with giving workers more voice in that process.
In this project we first study the willingness of politicians to invest in their careers. We conduct an experiment where we invite politicians to attend a training workshop. The invitation varies in the kinds of information presented to the politician. Second, we randomize whether politicians attend the training itself and study the impact of this training on their performance.
We conduct a randomized field experiment in cooperation with the Regional Water Company Prishtina to improve payment behavior for water among private customers in Pristina (Kosovo). In a first stage, we conduct interviews to investigate reasons for non-payment. In the second stage, we attach stickers to customers' invoices and highlight the most important numbers on the water bill. Customers can put these stickers as reminders to pay on the insider of their door. In total there are six sticker treatments. Three stickers types highlight the positive consequences of paying (gain) and three highlight the negative consequences of not paying (loss). Within each frame, we test two types of self-concept treatment over a basic sticker. The self-concept stickers intend to link the payment behavi...
Research on understanding the factors and decision processes that influence men and women to pursue an entrepreneurial career has gained momentum during the past years. We investigate in how far exposure to real-life entrepreneurial role models as one educational variable in a German university entrepreneurship course has an effect on the entrepreneurial intentions, attitudes and entrepreneurial self-efficacy of students. Over a period of two years, we conduct a randomized field experiment within a full-semester, mandatory entrepreneurship course for undergraduate students at a large German university. Our sample comprises 1133 students that work in 228 teams of four to five. Each team collaborates with one of 116 participating business founders, of which 30 are female. We define eigh...
A significant part of the labor force in developing countries is engaged in small-scale entrepreneurship; however, many small businesses in these contexts suffer from low productivity. Policy makers in developing countries have been increasing efforts to support small-scale entrepreneurs in order to foster broad-based economic growth. One common policy response is to offer training to entrepreneurs; however, the results of managerial training on business performance have been mixed. In particular, women do not seem to benefit as much from training as men do. The psychological literature has shown promising results from training aiming to modify entrepreneurs’ mindsets, but more evidence is needed to confirm the robustness of these results. This study is unique in that it compares th...
In an experimental setting, we plan to test whether spectators have a willingness to pay to have an income distribution adhering to their fairness views implemented upon a pair of workers. Before spectators decide whether to implement their fairness views, we elicit participants' perceived prevalence of their own fairness views to see whether this is correlated with their willingness to implement. In one treatment, spectators are informed about the empirical prevalence of their fairness views among the workers, before their willingness to pay is elicited. We argue that existence of a statistically significant treatment effect would be indicative of non-paternalistic motivation of implementing fairness views.
Working with five Ethiopian firms, we randomized applicants to an industrial job offer, an “entrepreneurship” program of $300 plus business training, or control status. Industrial jobs offered more and steadier hours but low wages and risky conditions. One year impacts show that the job offer doubled exposure to industrial work but, since most quit within months, had no impact on employment or income after a year. Applicants largely took industrial work to cope with adverse shocks. This exposure, meanwhile, significantly increased health problems. The entrepreneurship program raised earnings 33% and provided steadier hours. When barriers to self-employment were relieved, applicants preferred entrepreneurial to industrial labor. We are returning for a five year followup to see if these e...
Recent literature has shown the effect of inherited or assigned identity on economic behavior and human decision making in general. We investigate if priming an aspired (or rejected) identity has an influence on real effort provision (learning a language). Additionally, we will analyze the effect of both loss- and gain-framed identity primes on the learning behavior in a language learning application. In our setting, we prime newly arrived migrants on the host country's identity either with a loss or a gain framing. We analyze the effect of the different primes on the language app's utilization with a number of different parameters tracked by the app.
Property taxes are levied by local governments and often represent an important component in their budget funding. As such they play a crucial role in the face of increasing needs for public services in rapidly growing cities. In the context of developing countries, with cadaster shortcomings, weak administrative information and IT systems and poor enforcement tools, most local administrations experience substantial shortfall in property tax revenues. In collaboration with the Senegalese National Tax Authority (Direction Générale des Impôts et des Domaines), our project aims at improving tax collections by intervening on two of these specific deficiencies: 1) by introducing a cadaster survey software to modernize the property tax information system and 2) by distributing compliance mes...
We estimate the extent to which low savings rates for many individuals can be explained by high returns to capital in their businesses or in businesses they would like to start. We also estimate the correlation between risk aversion and precautionary savings. In addition, we estimate the extent to which business owners may be more risk loving when they have a target good that they would like to purchase, because they have less use for intermediate levels of funds. We estimate the returns to capital for households of different risk aversion levels and with different patience levels, and combine this with information on their savings rates and borrowing rates at baseline.