AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12717 studies with locations in 171 countries.
This study will explore the effectiveness of delivering climate change education in schools, using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Bangladesh. The primary objective is to examine the impact of two information interventions on students' and teachers' climate change knowledge, attitudes, and willingness to take action against climate change. Another goal is to investigate whether enhanced climate change awareness leads to greater interest in and pursuit of STEM fields.
How social ties are formed, maintained, and mobilized has changed with the adoption of digital communication technologies like WhatsApp. This paper estimates the value of communication infrastructure that sustains social networks and examines the short-run causal effects of losing partial access to it on social capital and subjective well-being. We conduct a field experiment in three remote island communities in Indonesia, recruiting approximately 1,200 household heads as participants. To elicit individuals’ willingness to accept a partial daily restriction on WhatsApp usage, we implement the double-bounded dichotomous choice (DBDC) method. Participants are then randomly assigned to a treatment group, in which WhatsApp access is restricted for 4 hours per day over 6 days, or to a contro...
Women turnout at a lower rate to vote in elections compared to men in many societies. We investigate if the low turnout is the result of misbeliefs about social norms or misbeliefs of men about how women vote. We plan implement two interventions: (i) provide correct information support for women voting among men of the community, and (ii) correct beliefs about alignment between candidate choices of women and men in elections. We will study the effect of these interventions on turnout decisions of women.
This study investigates preferences in the appointment of high-level bureaucrats in local authorities--who are arguably more consequential for public service delivery than their counterparts in central and federal governments, the recent focus of most studies on bureaucrats. We study the contractual process from both the demand side –i.e., mayors’ screening– and the supply side –i.e., bureaucrats’ selection into the role. We survey mayors and appointed high-level bureaucrats across municipalities in Peru. In this survey, we introduce discrete choice experiments to elicit average preferences underlying mayors’ appointments of high-level managers within their office, as well as bureaucrats’ valuation over alternative contract arrangements. From the bureaucrats’ side, we elicit their valua...
Effective leadership stands out as a key driver of organizational performance, but we know little about how to select the best leaders. We use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to explore this question in a real-world, high-stakes public sector context. This project investigates how to select ‘Champions’ among midwives to lead the implementation of a new obstetric triage programme (OTIP). Given that the current management-led selection might miss opportunities to leverage peer networks, which is crucial for OTIP, we study if a bottom-up selection approach, based on peers selecting champions, could be more effective to improve performance of frontline workers than a top-down approach. We use primary data from patients on service quality as key performance measures. To understand mechan...
The production and consumption of animal-based food have increasingly become a polarized and salient issue in political debates. The issue resembles the dynamics of a wedge issue – a topic strategically emphasized by parties, especially populist parties, to mobilize and polarize supporters. On 27 September 2026, Swiss citizens will vote on the «Initiative für eine sichere Ernährung (Ernährungsinitiative)» in a popular vote. The initiative calls for increased domestic food self-sufficiency and a shift from animal food toward more plant-based food production and consumption. This pre-registered study leverages this real-world vote to experimentally examine how the politicization around the issue of animal-based food consumption and production, specifically its salience and polarization, s...
Many overindebted individuals are subject to debt enforcement without any possibility of ever repaying their debts. Debt relief, which in Sweden is a five-year program, is realistically their only chance out of overindebtedness. However, many do not apply for debt relief. This study aims to investigate both how overindebted individuals may be motivated to apply for debt relief and what the individual consequences of debt relief are. For the former question we relate to the literature on how targeted information may affect take-up for various means-tested social benefits. For the latter question, previous research has mainly studied correlations in observational data and, e.g., found that while overindebtness correlates with bad outcomes (e.g., physical and mental illness), it is not cle...
Malnutrition is pervasive in Uganda, with about 30% of children experiencing stunted growth. This is linked to a lack of knowledge of good nutrition practices and social norms limiting the consumption of certain foods for vulnerable members. These challenges are most prevalent in the consumption of ASFs. In this study, we implement a combination of gender-differentiated interventions to improve the nutritional outcomes of children and mothers. In our baseline treatment (WN), we deliver a nutrition knowledge module similar to a standard Village Health Team (VHT) nutrition package, as captured by the MIYCAN Counselling Cards of the Ugandan Ministry of Health. This is only administered to women. The second treatment (WmenN) arm receives a similar nutrition knowledge intervention for males....
This study examines the role of parental misperceptions and information gaps in contributing to the persistently high rates of child undernutrition in India. It is guided by two core hypotheses: 1) Parents systematically overestimate the nutritional status of their children (if parents form expectations about how healthy their child is by observing other children around them, then parents in areas with high levels of stunting and wasting may be more likely to believe that their own child is relatively healthy), and 2) Parents systematically underestimate the returns to child nutrition on long-term health, education, and labor market outcomes. These misperceptions, if proven true, may create a suboptimal equilibrium for child nutrition outcomes, trapping families in a cycle of inadequate...
This study evaluates a new approach to community-based forest management, “Competition for Ecosystem Services” (CES), which introduces competitive incentives into a traditional Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) framework. CES creates an internal competitive structure among participating communities, rewarding those that demonstrate relatively greater conservation achievements. We implement a randomized controlled experiment with 60 Village Common Forests (VCFs) in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, randomly assigned to CES, PES, or a control group. Forest carbon stocks are measured before and after the intervention using drone-based multispectral imagery, calibrated with ground-plot biomass data. Carbon conservation serves as the primary outcome and is estimated at the 30 m × ...