AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12407 studies with locations in 171 countries.
A first study in schools in rural Madagascar evaluated the effect of a bundle of hygiene-focused interventions in schools and showed substantial improvements in girls’ learning outcomes (+0.2SD). Building on these results, this study will run a second RCT to disentangle the effects of physical infrastructure from all the other components of the intervention (sensitization and sanitary pads). This separation is crucial for cost-effectiveness analysis (since physical infrastructure is expected to account for about 60% of the per-head intervention cost), and for understanding the mechanisms through which expanding access to infrastructure can complement female empowerment interventions. The study will measure effects on learning, psychosocial wellbeing, and a variety of secondary outcomes.
Essential public-sector workers in low- and middle-income countries (teachers, health workers, police officers) operate under chronic stress, exposure to community violence, and institutional neglect of their mental health. Burnout, anxiety, and untreated trauma are pervasive among these frontline workers, yet rigorous evidence on scalable interventions to support their wellbeing remains nearly nonexistent. This gap matters not only to the workers themselves, but also to the quality of public services they deliver. We provide experimental evidence on whether socio-emotional resilience training can improve the mental health and professional effectiveness of essential workers, focusing on public school teachers in Guatemala. We evaluate SanaMente, a trauma-informed training program that b...
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We explore the role that AI may play in idea generation and evaluation processes.
Many actions in organizations do not directly benefit the individuals who take them, yet they create meaningful value for others or for the organization as a whole. Such behaviors are often described as discretionary behaviors. Despite their importance for learning and improvement, it remains unclear how organizations can encourage individuals to engage in them at scale. We examine this question in the setting of student course evaluations at a major French business school. Completing an evaluation is a voluntary contribution that can support teaching and program improvements. Yet, it offers limited immediate private benefits to the individual student. As a result, participation is often lower than institutions would like, even though evaluations are an important input into improvement ...
Collective decisions in the real world rarely occur in isolation but within systems where authority shapes norms, expectations, and outcomes. While extensive research has examined leadership in cooperative behavior, the distinct influence of authority, in particular how its legitimacy affects compliance remains underexplored. This gap is especially critical in environmental dilemmas where technical solutions require deeper understanding of human behavioral responses to different sources of power. This study investigates how different sources of authority influence rule compliance in a public bad game, and how the authorities themselves perceive the sources of power. In addition, we examine whether the mere presence of an Authority affects investment decisions by comparing behavior ...
Sub-Saharan Africa faces high youth unemployment, with women disproportionately excluded from labor market opportunities due to mobility and social constraints. At the same time, global freelancing platforms offer opportunities to earn wages that far exceed those available in local markets. Yet, informational and reputational frictions—such as limited knowledge of effective bidding strategies, weak initial profiles, and lack of job search persistence—as well as liquidity constraints prevent many skilled workers from successfully entering these markets. This study evaluates whether reducing these frictions improves labor market outcomes for young African professionals in remote work. We will conduct a randomized controlled trial with workers who meet baseline screening criteria. Parti...
This study examines how online dispute-resolution systems should be designed when a dispute can be reduced to a single compensation amount. Economic theory provides two natural benchmarks in this setting: direct bargaining and a structured one-shot ODR procedure based on the canonical sealed-bid mechanism. However, real platforms often add practical features such as bid revision after an impasse, algorithmic intervention when the parties’ requests are incompatible. These features are common in practice but are not well rationalized by standard bargaining theory, making their value an empirical question. In an online experiment, participants bargain over the division of 100 points while each has a private fallback amount if no agreement is reached. Participants are randomly assigned to B...
In many economically important environments, people receive information from sources whose interests are transparent. Such communication naturally invites skepticism because receivers understand that senders have incentives to influence their beliefs. However, skepticism should not be indiscriminate. When a sender communicates a message that contradicts the direction in which the sender benefits from influencing the receiver, the message becomes particularly credible because it is difficult to reconcile with purely opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we ask whether receivers exploit this credibility of such incentive-incongruent messages or whether they continue to rely primarily on their own judgment, even when sender incentives imply that a message is unusually likely to be true? ...
This study evaluates how survey mode and respondent selection protocols affect the accuracy of food security estimates. The experiment is embedded in a household survey implemented by the World Food Programme (WFP) in Colombia. Households are randomly assigned to one control group and three treatment groups: (1) a food diary benchmark group, (2) a face‑to‑face survey group, (3) a phone survey group without respondent selection protocol, and (4) a phone survey group with a respondent selection protocol designed to identify knowledgeable respondents involved in food‑related household decisions. The research addresses three questions: (1) whether phone surveys generate less accurate food security estimates compared to face‑to‑face surveys when benchmarked against food diaries; (2) wheth...