AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2607 studies with locations in 136 countries.
Medical debt is potentially a large burden for many Americans—with 44 million individuals holding an aggregate $75 billion in medical debt. While these nominal amounts are staggering, it is unclear to what extent medical debt harms financial well-being. Medical debt recovery rates are low, suggesting that the pure “balance sheet” cost of medical debt is modest for most individuals. Yet medical debt may harm individuals through lower credit scores, higher interest rates, and reduced access to credit—impairing economic opportunities and perhaps even locking individuals in “debt traps.” Collaborating with RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit that buys and abolishes medical debt, we will implement a randomized-control trial (RCT) to study the impact of medical debt. Medical debt will be forgiven...
Medical debt is potentially a large burden for many Americans -- with 44 million individuals holding an aggregate $75 billion in medical debt. While these nominal amounts are staggering, it is unclear to what extent medical debt harms financial well-being. Medical debt recovery rates are low, suggesting that the pure “balance sheet” cost of medical debt is modest for most individuals. Yet medical debt may harm individuals through lower credit scores, higher interest rates, and reduced access to credit -- impairing economic opportunities and perhaps even locking individuals in “debt traps.” Collaborating with RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit that buys and abolishes medical debt, we will implement a randomized-control trial (RCT) to study the impact of medical debt. Medical debt will be fo...
We describe the analysis plan for a laboratory experiment that will examine the effects of hydrocortisone administration on in-group preferences, specifically coethnic preference. The study will be conducted with individuals living in Nairobi, Kenya who are from the Luo, Kikuyu, Luhya and Kamba ethnic groups. Using a double-blind procedure, participants are randomly administered either a placebo or an identical-looking 20 mg dose of hydrocortisone, a drug that increases the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Participants complete several experimental tasks in which they are paired with individuals that vary in their gender, age group, and ethnicity. We outline the study design, the outcomes of interest, and the econometric strategy for the analysis.
Recent evidence from a multi-country study (Banerjee et al. 2015 ) and from Bangladesh (Bandiera et al. 2017 ) suggests that a multifaceted program implemented by BRAC under a graduation model can lead to consistent and lasting impacts on consumption, food security, assets ownership, household income, and revenues. This study adapts BRAC’s approach in a multidimensional project focused this time on child nutrition, household food security, and resilience, and evaluates its impact in the Boucle du Mouhoun and the East regions of Burkina Faso. This cluster randomized-control trial seeks to assess the independent contributions of assets and nutrition interventions, potential spill-over of such policy on the other individuals in the village and the cost-effectiveness of such policies in the...
What is the role of community preferences in driving the viability of village relocation programs following natural disasters? Nepal’s post-2015 earthquake village resettlement program, an effort to shift high-risk communities to safer, previously unsettled, locations provides a setting in which to examine this question. A key challenge in this program is how to fairly and transparently allocate new private residential space to households, while maintaining individual and overall community satisfaction with the relocation effort. In response, the government plans to administer land lotteries in affected villages. This paper focuses on understanding potential drivers behind the popularity of different lottery types and seeks to understand its implications for community engagement eff...
We carry out an experiment with more than 900 municipal officials (mayors, council members, and municipal secretaries) in Brazil to measure their demand for research information and to identify what types of research findings change their beliefs.
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...
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.
We run a natural field experiment with an appliance retailer in the United Kingdom. Randomly selected subjects receive a discount or different types of vouchers that need to be redeemed before check-out. We vary the level of difficulty to redeem the voucher and analyze its effect on redemption rates. A subset of subjects receive an additional intervention reminding them to redeem the voucher before check-out.
The market for residential solar panels in the United States is growing rapidly. Yet, there are concerns that its expansion is not benefiting some population groups, especially people from lower-income households and people living in multifamily homes. As a result, new business models are emerging, reaching out to these groups. One of them is peer-to-peer solar. People who cannot have or afford a solar panel can purchase electricity from another household, through a peer-to-peer market. This study examines the effect of information campaigns promoting the adoption of solar panels through peer-to-peer solar. These campaigns would inform potential customers about the social aspects of joining the platform. Our campaigns are launched concurrently to citywide initiatives raising attention t...