AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12443 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Experiment A is part of a larger project studying risky choice in GoalQuest, an employee rewards program in which workers choose one of three increasingly ambitious performance goals paired with increasingly valuable all-or-nothing rewards. The broader paper uses field data from GoalQuest to document excess conservative choice and choice heterogeneity, and develops a mechanism in which people evaluate nested risky options through pairwise comparisons while neglecting the relevant conditional probabilities. Experiment A addresses a key conceptual step in the project: whether behavior in a stylized GoalQuest menu resembles behavior in economically equivalent lottery menus, and whether conservative choice changes when the relevant pairwise conditional probabilities are made salient. The pr...
From an economic perspective, human capital investment decisions are driven by a comparison of expected lifetime benefits and costs. When information is asymmetric — as is particularly acute for students from migrant and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, but not exclusive to them — subjective expectations deviate from objective returns: families tend to overestimate the direct and indirect costs of higher education (tuition, living expenses, opportunity cost) and underestimate its long-term benefits (wage premiums, employment stability). This informational wedge can flip the Human Capital Model's investment inequality, producing suboptimal non-enrollment among individuals who would experience positive net returns from tertiary education. This study implements a five-armed randomized c...
We will run a randomized evaluation with unemployed youth (ages 18–35) on South Africa’s SAYouth.mobi platform, in partnership with Harambee, to test scalable ways of helping jobseekers identify their skills and act on better information. The study has two parts. First, we offer an AI-supported skills-elicitation and CV-builder conversation (powered by a large language model) to see whether it helps young people surface prior experience, describe their skills more clearly, and progress in job search. Second, we test how to present personalized labour-market facts so they motivate rather than discourage. Some participants receive only a concise “good-news” message that highlights which of their skill areas are in higher demand (“Pull-only”). Others receive the same recommendation plus an...
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...
This study examines how the salience of dividend tax information affects investor behavior. Using a randomized controlled experiment, we deliver differentiated tax policy and dividend-related information to investors at key stages of the dividend distribution process, including the dividend announcement date, the implementation date of the dividend plan, and the record date. We then evaluate how increasing the salience of tax information influences investors’ trading behavior, holding periods, and investment returns. This study aims to explore the effect of targeted policy-oriented investor education at the micro level and provide empirical evidence for enhancing the transmission of tax policies and improving investor education.
This pilot survey experiment seeks to replicate and extend Conklin (2020) by examining whether calling a complainant a “victim,” rather than a “complaining witness,” affects how people evaluate an alleged assault case. Participants will read a brief vignette in which a defendant denies that an assault occurred and claims that the complainant fabricated the accusation. The experiment randomly varies the term used to refer to the complainant (“victim” versus “complaining witness”) and the complainant’s gender in the vignette. After reading the vignette, participants will answer questions about whether they believe the defendant punched the complainant, whether they agree that the complainant is a victim, and other questions about the two parties and their claims. The study is intended to ...
Marriage is among the largest financial decisions an Indian family makes. Dowry transfers at a daughter's wedding can consume more than a year of household income, and the quality of her match shapes her economic security, autonomy, and well-being for decades. How wisely families allocate financial resources across daughters therefore matters enormously. Parents typically arrange their children's marriages in birth order. If a good elder match functions as a positive signal to the marriage market, improving how prospective grooms' families view the household, then parents can capitalise on this spillover by strategically allocating more resources to the elder daughter's match. If no such spillover exists, or if parents misjudge it, the same allocation deprives the younger sister of reso...
Governments seeking to expand childcare access face particular challenges in small local markets. Childcare provision is labor-intensive and entails substantial fixed and operating costs, making it difficult for facilities in sparsely populated areas to attract enough users to remain viable. Uncertainty about local demand, suitable premises, staffing, and other organizational barriers may further deter entry. Consequently, some communities remain “ "childcare deserts" with no formal childcare provider. In Poland, approximately 30% of municipalities lack childcare providers despite substantial subsidies for providers and parents. To investigate why, we will conduct an online survey of representatives of public and private childcare providers. Participants will evaluate hypothetical r...
This study examines whether informational primes can shift people’s mindsets about the causes of income inequality and whether such changes affect inequality beliefs. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of three groups: a no-information control group, a group receiving information emphasizing individual-level explanations for income inequality, and a group receiving information emphasizing structural explanations for income inequality. The study then compares post-treatment mindsets, beliefs, and policy preferences across groups.
This study evaluates the effect of a classroom instruction improvement program on students' higher-order thinking skills (HOTS) in public primary schools in Bhutan. Using a cluster RCT, 100 schools are randomly assigned to treatment (49) or control (51). Treatment schools receive a mathematics teacher training program, focused on developing students' HOTS, combined with school-based coaching and monitoring by principals. The intervention targets Grade 5 mathematics. Primary outcome is an IRT-scaled mathematics test measuring foundational and higher-order mathematics skills. Secondary outcomes include student motivation and attitudes toward mathematics, classroom instructional practices, principals' and teachers' practices and attitudes in teaching HOTS, and student reading proficiency i...