AEA RCT Registry currently lists 9861 studies with locations in 169 countries.
The Ultra Poor Graduation approach is designed to graduate households out of extreme poverty to a more stable state. The BOMA Project has adapted the graduation approach for the arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) of Africa with their Rural Entrepreneur Access Project (REAP). In 2019 BOMA created “Green” REAP as a way for communities to minimize the negative environmental impact of business activities, spur positive engagement with the environment, adapt to the climate crisis and mitigate the impact of climate change on the community. Green REAP aims to simultaneously move households out of extreme poverty and create positive environmental impacts. Its three main pillars are greening livelihoods (using green enterprises to graduate the ultra-poor out of poverty), greening systems (advocati...
Religion serves as an important source of beliefs for many across the world yet we know little about how religion and religious leaders contribute to belief formation. In this study, I exploit a unique partnership with the Punjab Auqaf Department in Pakistan, responsible for running state religious properties, to experimentally vary sermon content in 300 mosques and evaluate the causal impact of religious sermons on mosque-goers' social beliefs and behavior. By randomizing imams to sermon scripts emphasizing the importance of community rights and women's rights, I explore the importance of religious messaging for prosociality towards neighbors, community engagement, and attitudes towards women's social and economic participation.
Diagnostic errors are a major source of preventable patient harm. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting with clinical decision-making, potentially improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency. However, the impact of LLMs on medical doctors' diagnostic reasoning compared to conventional diagnostic resources remains unclear. This study aims to evaluate whether providing medical doctors (including physicians and surgeons) with access to ChatGPT-4o, in addition to standard resources, enhances their diagnostic reasoning performance. All participating doctors will have completed at least a 10-hour training program covering ChatGPT-4o usage, prompt engineering techniques, and output evaluation strategies.
Mental illnesses often go undiagnosed or untreated in low-income settings. Mental health care may be especially important for the elderly - events in the lives of the elderly, like illnesses or deaths of peers, may put these individuals at high risk of mental illness. The study will constitute a randomized controlled trial aimed at reducing depression among elderly women over a 12-week period. Through two interventions, the investigators will aim to improve women elder's outlook on life and relationships through cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and facilitated group activities. There will be a total of four treatment arms: one for CBT during home visits, one for facilitated group activities, one for both, and a control group receiving neither the CBT nor facilitated group activities. ...
Startups face high failure rates, with two thirds never generating a positive return. To facilitate growth of high potential startups, business accelerators have emerged in recent years. These accelerators provide a combination of networking opportunities with peer firms and potential funders, as well as some training in pitching and marketing products effectively. However, there is limited causal evidence on the impact of business incubation and accelerator programs on firm survival and growth, especially in developing countries where the marginal returns to these investments could be high. This project aims to test whether business accelerators causally impact firms’ outcomes using a randomized control trial in Bangladesh.
The goal of this project is to provide insights into food consumption choices in the presence of greenhouse gas emissions. This will be investigated in an experiment studying incentivized choices between different restaurant meal options. The experimental conditions vary in the information which is provided to participants at the moment of choice.
The purpose is to understand how smokers respond to cigarette taxes. Specifically, we study how smokers reallocate their budgets when cigarettes become more expensive, a subject about which little is known. This is especially surprising because the literature has found little effect of cigarette taxes on smoking. That is, given a household budget constraint, when cigarette taxes increase, something must change if smokers are to continue smoking at the same intensity. In addition to an analysis of consumer expenditure survey (CEX) data, we plan to conduct a randomized survey experiment via the survey research platform Prolific. The survey will be of 2,200 current smokers. We plan to ask baseline questions on smoking intensity and shopping behavior, as well as consumption of non-combusti...
The goal of this project is to provide insights into food consumption choices in the presence of greenhouse gas emissions. This will be investigated in an experiment studying incentivized choices between different restaurant meal options. The experimental conditions vary in the information which is provided to participants at the moment of choice.
Each year, millions of Medicaid beneficiaries must redemonstrate their eligibility to avoid losing coverage. Challenges with the required paperwork can result in eligible people losing their benefits for procedural reasons (i.e., because their paperwork was missing or contained errors). In 2023 alone, 9 million people lost Medicaid coverage for procedural reasons. This study will evaluate an intervention aimed at averting and remediating loss of Medicaid coverage for procedural reasons among eligible individuals. The experimental population includes 130,000 households in Wisconsin who lost Medicaid coverage for procedural reasons. The implementation partner is Covering Wisconsin, Wisconsin’s federally certified Navigator organization. Experimental arms include a group receiving a pre-re...
Can social signaling incentivize adults to take up deworming treatment? Working with the Kenyan Government, we implement a new Community Deworming Program that offers free deworming treatment to adults and explicitly emphasizes the public good aspect of deworming. We test two types of social incentives in the form of colorful bracelets and ink that adults receive upon coming for deworming. Different to most incentives that are material or private in nature (e.g. food, cash transfers) the bracelets and ink make the decision to deworm or abstain from treatment observable and allow adults to signal to others that they contributed to protecting their community from worms. We further introduce a calendar as private incentive that is comparable in its consumption value to the bracelet but can...