AEA RCT Registry currently lists 4636 studies with locations in 159 countries.
We conduct an adaptive experiment to select one out of six treatment arms of biweekly phone calls to parents that deliver reading exercises for first graders. The experiment is carried out in two waves - start to midterm, and midterm to endterm - during term 3 of the first grade in a sample of 108 private primary schools in Kenya. The method uses Bayesian econometrics to estimate average treatment effects and exploration sampling (Kasy and Sautmann, 2021) to assign parents to treatment arms in each wave. The objective is to identify the treatment arm with the highest average "correct words per minute" (cwpm) score.
We study gender discrimination in hiring decisions in a representative sample from the United States. Participants are incentivized to choose between two candidates, one male, one female, to write an advertizing slogan for a product. They see information about the candidates, as well a sample of past work (a slogan for another product). Past work was either performed alone or in a team. Our first study will examine how discrimination varies between individual and teamwork settings, varying team composition, gender stereotypes attached to the products, and two policies aimed at reducing discrimination. Our second study will examine discrimination in the aggregate and how it varies with exposure to shocks during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Blight and crime are detrimental to the physical, mental, and social health of individuals and communities. Blight (e.g. physical disorder, vacant structures) gives the impression of low levels of social cohesion and provides concealed spaces in which criminal activity has been shown to occur. There is growing evidence that place-based interventions may successful and sustainable in improving wellbeing by changing the structures of places that enable crime and blight to remain persistently high. This place-based intervention brings together public servants and community partners for intensive and rapid beautification and restoration, outreach and education, and codes and law enforcement focused on blocks in distressed neighborhoods. The program runs May-October, targeting clusters of 20...
The study's objective is to test whether there is more cognitive noise in subjects' belief formation in an environment with more uncertainty.
This project aims to offer clues on the behavioral motives that affect financial decision-making by individuals. We evaluate the randomized administration of behaviorally motivated SMS messages and renegotiation options implemented by a financial institution. The treatments will include behaviorally motivated texts intended to nudge non-business clients into debt repayment. Thus, our trial will test out the effectiveness of behaviorally motivated messages, the relative effectiveness of different behavioral motives and the interaction of these two elements with renegotiation options. This way, through randomization and a period of monitoring and follow-up on clients, this project hopes to identify the most effective behavioral motives for financial nudges in relation to repayment outcome...
In this study, participants will be asked to predict and explain the effects on COVID-19 vaccine intentions from two types of information about extreme behavior to secure access to the vaccine. More precisely, participants in treatment 1 will be asked to predict and explain the effect on vaccine intentions from information about some people taking extreme actions to jump the line for the vaccines, and participants in treatment 2 will be asked to predict and explain the effect on vaccine intentions from information about so called "vaccine hunters." (Participants' predictions will later be compared to the actual outcome, i.e., results from a previous study that documents the effects on vaccine intentions from the information about the extreme behavior described in treatment 1 and 2 in th...
We recruit local politicians in Nepal for a phone survey to test whether their personal experiences, and especially participation in the Nepal People’s War, affect their political views and policy priorities. First, participants are randomized into three groups: i) participants in the control group are not asked to reflect on the link between their personal experiences and policy priorities; ii) participants in the “personal experiences prime” treatment group are asked to reflect on how their personal experiences affect their policy priorities, without any specific mention of the civil war; and finally, iii) participants in the “civil war prime” treatment group are asked to reflect on their personal experiences during the civil war and how these affect their policy priorities. We then m...
We plan to provide an RCT to assess the effect of online courses in schools on intentions, career-related actions, and career choices to become an opportunity driven entrepreneur or choose a STEM type of education. We plan to work with to 15-17-year-old students (about 20,000 students) in 110 schools. We will randomly assign schools either to treatment (and receiving the entrepreneurship and science content online), or placebo-control (receiving a placebo treatment of online courses from standard curricula) groups. Within the treatment group, we randomize at the grade-level the type of entrepreneurship curricula, and then randomize the order of entrepreneurship and science courses to measure the short-term effects of each component and to mitigate order effects. In addition, we cross-r...
This paper studies educational plans and perception of pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns to higher education of Swiss pupils in times of the Covid-19 pandemic. I make use of subjective quantitative measures and a priming treatment to analyse the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on educational intentions and future earnings expectations in Switzerland.
The mandatory shelter-in-place orders instituted across the globe to contain the spread of Covid-19 have caused a massive exogenous shock on households. While the near-term effects on unemployment and violence against women have already been reported, the lasting consequences for physical and mental health, labor productivity, and human capital investment in children remain unknown. This intervention seeks to fortify the responses of vulnerable households by borrowing content from a proven tablet-based female financial education program (known as LISTA), enhancing it with partner communication heuristics, and communicating these messages via WhatsApp. The program targets minimum-wage households in Colombia receiving pre-existing monetary subsidies during the Covid-19 emergency. By provi...