AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12716 studies with locations in 171 countries.
This study investigates "shallow inference" in hiring evaluations, defined as the failure of observers to account for the difference in socio-economic constraints behind observed performance signals. Using a vignette experiment with MBA and executive MBA students acting as evaluators, the research explores how markers of socio-economic status (SES) influence beliefs regarding underlying ability and organizational fit. The design utilizes several rounds of relative assessments varying SES indicators such as first-in-family university status and stereotyped extracurricular activities. The study tests whether evaluators naturally correct for SES-driven disadvantages or if explicit contextual information regarding economic constraints and challenges that the applicant had to overcome is re...
This study characterizes MBA students' mental models of monetary incentives, meaning their subjective beliefs about how different compensation contracts affect employee behavior.
This study examines whether greater engagement with career resources during college helps improve undergraduate students' career outcomes.
Cash Transfers directed to disadvantaged high school graduates can alleviate liquidity constraints, allowing them to search longer for a better job match or to use the transfer for additional educational investments. However, transfer gains may not reach their full transformative potential if the barriers shaping post-graduation decisions are multidimensional. Informational frictions on the returns to higher education programs and a lack of information on financial planning can lead to suboptimal investments that would be beneficial for students´ future careers. Students may also face behavioral frictions- such as low self-confidence and self-efficacy, present-bias and lack of aspirations, resulting in suboptimal job-search effort and educational/occupational choices. We plan to conduct...
This study examines the influence of role models on students’ academic aspirations, motivation, and performance. We implement a randomized controlled trial in a large undergraduate class with a two-layer randomization design. First, half of the students are exposed to short biographies of six successful eminent young economists who overcame various challenges, while the other half serve as a control group. Second, students are randomly assigned to small working groups of 3–4 peers, which generates exogenous variation in exposure to high-achieving classmates. This design allows us to separately identify the effects of “distant” role models—prominent figures outside the classroom—and “proximate” role models—high-performing peers within the classroom. By comparing the impacts of these two ...
Chile has experienced a rapid expansion in the tertiary-educated workforce — from 21.9% of the labor force with completed higher education in 2010 to 41.6% in 2025 — without a commensurate expansion in demand for skilled labor. Roughly 250,000 people aged 25–35 are underemployed, close to 40% of all underemployment in the country, while about 60% of firms report persistent difficulty finding talent. Only 44% of affiliates aged 20–35 actively contribute to the pension system. This study evaluates Despega tu Pega (DtP), a national program combining (i) an individualized skills diagnostic delivered through the Relink platform using the MapHa skills taxonomy, across employability, digital and productivity dimensions; (ii) personalized training pathways ("skillpacks") designed to close the ...
New Teacher Center’s recent federal Education and Innovation Research grant demonstrates that well-facilitated Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) lead to teacher growth and student learning. In this study, we will partner with an artificial intelligence-driven educator coaching tool to explore the effectiveness and impact of teacher PLCs that receive AI-enabled feedback compared to PLCs that self-assess without neutral party, low inference feedback. If proven effective, an AI-enabled feedback approach could yield a highly cost-effective, impactful coaching tool for school communities.
This study examines how individuals interpret financial performance information and make entrepreneurial and business decisions. Participants evaluate business scenarios presenting different financial-performance conditions and provide judgments concerning business performance, financial indicators, and potential business actions. The study collects measures of participants’ use and understanding of accounting and financial information, familiarity with and use of financial ratios, accounting and finance education or training, entrepreneurship experience and background, and experience using artificial intelligence and other technology-assisted resources for business analysis. The study also includes measures of regulatory focus and fit to examine individual differences in decision orien...
Across the developing world, women face mobility barriers that constrain access to jobs, education, and social networks. Gender-targeted transport policies, such as Delhi's Pink Ticket Scheme, which grants women free bus travel, aim to ease these constraints but may generate unintended consequences at the point of delivery. We study whether free fares lead bus drivers to discriminate against female passengers, raising the effective cost of travel for the very group the policy targets. Descriptive data show that buses fail to stop for women roughly 50% more often than for men. Combining a mystery shopper field exercise with a lab-in-the-field experiment with bus drivers and conductors, we causally identify discriminatory non-stopping behavior and decompose its underlying mechanisms, dist...
Food systems have far-reaching impacts that result in public health costs and environmental damage which are not reflected in retail prices, but are borne implicitly by society. True Cost Accounting has emerged as a framework for making these costs visible, and is increasingly invoked to justify food policies that mitigate and internalize the public health and environmental health costs in food prices. Yet operationalization of true cost food policies to date has focused almost entirely on consumers- on true-cost labels and true pricing at the point of purchase - while a central element of its proposed theory of change remains untested: whether communicating these costs to the public affects support for the policy instruments that would mitigate and internalize the true cost of food in ...