AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11682 studies with locations in 170 countries.
The household finance literature has found that investors often deviate from optimal investment behavior and suffer wealth losses due to factors such as incomplete information, lack of financial knowledge, and behavioral biases. Investment advisors perform multiple functions including information provision, investor education, and asset allocation recommendations, serving as crucial means to assist investors. Currently, there are two popular logics for investment advisor’s asset allocation recommendations: catering to investor preferences and educating investor. Exploring which asset allocation logic and design are more comprehensive, trustworthy, and beneficial to investors’ welfare holds significant implications for the upgrade of advisory services, development of financial markets, a...
Public trust is crucial for the functioning of many organizations, such as central banks. Therefore, it is important to understand which institutional characteristics affect it. More specifically, we ask whether an individualistic or a collectivist structure makes an organization more trustworthy; and whether or not communication in the form of organizational mission-statements increases public trust. To address these questions, we study repeated versions of a basic trust game in which the trustee is an organization where decisions are either made by an individual or a collective. A game-theoretic analysis implies that public trust may or may not occur for a collectivist structure with overlapping terms of decision-makers but that public trust is impossible to achieve for an organizatio...
In this correspondence study, we test for labor market discrimination in Malaysia by ethnicity and gender. In addition, we evaluate whether soft skill signals (leadership, teamwork, or none) are valued in the labor market, and their interaction with discriminatory behavior.
This study uses an experimental context to measure beliefs regarding treatment success rates after exposure to different promotional materials. The experiment assesses the type of disclosure necessary to update beliefs to be more in line with empirical success rates.
This project will evaluate the impact of outreach strategies aimed at encouraging non-compliant employers (i.e., have not previously registered or contacted the program) to comply with their state’s auto-IRA program – a retirement savings program offered by the state for employees whose employers do not offer their own qualifying plan. We will test the overall impact of simplified formal communication, as well as two different types of behaviorally informed messages, on program registration (or reporting an exemption) and follow-up information provision by the state.
This project aims to investigate if there is agreement regarding inequality aversion among the Swedish public, political, and medical decision-makers, in a discrete choice experiment. Subjects choose between two outcome distributions, where one choice is higher in life expectancy but with a higher variance between groups in the distribution. Furthermore, we consider whether the results are affected by whether a choice is made behind a veil of ignorance or not, a relevant distinction for decision makers who in practice make their decisions without a veil of ignorance. An information experiment is then performed to assess whether decision-makers can be influenced to make choices more in line with the general public's preferences. Half of the decision-makers are provided with the most popu...
Public support is essential for the energy transition, yet many citizens in developing countries remain poorly informed about transition policies, and the sense of urgency for climate action is declining. Whether highlighting personal gains or national interests when communicating the transition's benefits is more effective remains untested. We conduct a randomized field experiment with 2,000 nationally representative Indonesian adults, randomly assigning short videos that frame transition benefits at the state level (economic sovereignty, climate leadership), the individual level (health, stable prices, local jobs), or an unrelated placebo topic. Indonesia is an ideal setting for this study because its heavy coal dependence and large fuel subsidies make energy transition trade-offs sal...
The gender gap in microfinance exists in both the extensive (rejection) and intensive margins (smaller loan), and smaller loan sizes for female entrepreneurs prevent them from scaling up their businesses. Female entrepreneurs often request and receive smaller loans, partly because they tend to run smaller businesses. However, if a gender gap in loan size persists even among firms with similar marginal returns to capital, it may suggest capital misallocation. Our research aims to unpack the gender gap in microfinance loan sizes for small businesses in Ghana by examining both the demand and supply channels. Understanding the underlying mechanisms will inform future experiments designed to reduce this gap. To mitigate selection bias in analyzing gender differences, we focus on male and...
This study evaluates whether subsidized access to formal childcare increases women’s economic participation and improves child and household outcomes among low-income families in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The intervention offers eligible women a digital childcare voucher that covers 100% of fees to enroll a child aged 6–48 months in a pre-screened network of affordable childcare providers with spare capacity; voucher payments are administered through a digital platform operated by a major bank. The evaluation is a randomized controlled trial in nine sub-cities, targeting low-income women aged 18–49 who (i) have at least one child aged 6–48 months not currently attending external childcare, (ii) live within walking distance of a participating provider, and (iii) are willing to place a child...
This study examines how young people in Italy make investment decisions and how these decisions are influenced by their understanding of the risks and expected returns of different asset classes. The analysis relies on a survey experiment embedded in the 2026 Bank of Italy–Consob survey on the financial literacy of young adults in Italy. The experiment features a control group and two treatment groups exposed to enhanced risk disclosures. In addition to the standard warning about the possibility of losing the entire invested amount, the treatments provide (i) information on long run expected returns and (ii) on the opportunity cost of keeping funds in a current account, i.e. the loss of purchasing power caused by inflation. The study also investigates whether individual characteristics,...