AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12371 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Many empirical studies in economics, criminology, and public policy use the random assignment of cases to decision-makers—judges, prosecutors, bail magistrates, disability examiners, patent reviewers, and caseworkers—to identify the causal effects of their decisions. These “examiner IV” designs rely on a monotonicity assumption: examiners who are stricter on average must be weakly stricter for every individual case. Yet this assumption is essentially untestable in administrative data, because the same case is rarely decided by multiple examiners. This study conducts a vignette experiment with up to 250 Polish public prosecutors, each of whom independently recommends a sentence, including both type and severity, for the same fixed set of criminal cases. Observing many prosecutors’ dec...
Small and micro enterprises are the foundation of emerging market economies. Despite their aggregate importance, these firms often operate with limited market information. A small merchant may observe her own performance, but she rarely observes the performance of comparable nearby peers. This lack of peer information may prevent merchants from accurately assessing their market position and from making effective business decisions. This study uses a randomized field experiment to examine whether providing merchants with peer benchmark information affects their future decisions and performance. Eligible stores are randomly assigned to either a control group or an informational treatment group. Treated stores receive weekly in-app access to peer-information (revenue and relative standing)...
This study examines the design and impact of decentralization reforms to Zambia’s Constituency Development Fund (CDF). The reforms give selected Local Authorities (LAs) greater decision-making power and procurement flexibility to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of local public goods provision.
Many active labor market policies in low- and middle-income countries struggle to reduce youth unemployment (McKenzie 2017; Card et al. 2018). A growing literature suggests that the challenge may lie not only in policy design, but also in how policies are implemented by street-level bureaucrats (Besley et al. 2022; Bandiera et al. 2021). In this project, we focus on the performance of bureaucrats tasked with delivering these programs and the potential importance of misaligned incentives. Bureaucrats are frequently evaluated on easily observable, “box-ticking” outputs—such as the number of vacancies collected—rather than on harder-to-monitor outcomes like sustained job placements. This misalignment may skew effort toward the easily observable parts of the job. We study this question in A...
The goal of this experiment is to validate a set of AI-generated profile photographs that will later be used in a factorial survey experiment involving recruiters and HR professionals. The photographs are designed to represent young job candidates whose ethnic background is visually ambiguous, while allowing the addition of specific religious cues (e.g., headscarf, cross necklace, beard). The pre-test serves two main objectives. First, it verifies that the baseline photographs do not strongly signal a specific ethnic background. Second, it evaluates whether the selected photographs are comparable in terms of perceived physical attractiveness.
Women are underrepresented at every level of the corporate ladder. A growing and important experimental literature suggests that women are both more likely to avoid competition and drop out of competitive environments after experiencing disappointment than men. These laboratory measures seem also to predict career choices and, hence, partly explain the gender gap. We study the role of perceived unfairness in explaining gender differences in willingness to compete again in response to losing a competition. We ask whether men and women differ in how they respond to losing or winning a competition and whether these differences increase or decrease in presence of unfair conditions. Moreover, we aim to understand which women and men drive the gender gap. For this purpose, we run a post-exper...
We study whether individuals form motivated beliefs about others' preferences when such beliefs can rationalise self-interested behaviour. In an online experiment, participants report their own willingness to work (WTW) on real-effort tasks and predict a counterpart's WTW. Participants are randomly assigned to a role (Employer or Worker) and an incentive condition (Low or High). Employers make a payoff-relevant decision about how many tasks to assign their counterpart, while Workers act as pure predictors with no such stake. We test whether Employers report higher beliefs about a counterpart's WTW than Workers, and whether stronger incentives to assign tasks widen this gap. Using higher-order beliefs, we further examine whether individuals anticipate motivated reasoning in others, and w...
This study uses an online experiment to examine how consumers respond to different types of cash rebates linked to environmentally relevant consumption choices. Participants make repeated decisions about how many units of a product to purchase under a fixed price that reflects a carbon charge, with lower consumption associated with greater environmental benefits. We compare behavior under several treatments inlcuding a no rebate control, a guaranteed cash rebate, and several probabilistic rebate schemes that differ in the likelihood of rebate payment. The study is designed to assess whether probabilistic rebates generate similar behavioral responses to guaranteed rebates, and to examine whether responses vary systematically with the probability of receiving a rebate. This experiment con...
Many young people enter the labor market with few qualifications, limited information about available opportunities, and little experience navigating employment services. Governments often respond by offering career guidance, training, job search assistance, internships, or subsidized employment. Yet participation in these programs is frequently low. Young people may not enroll, may drop out early, or may attend meetings without taking up the investments that could improve their employment prospects. This paper studies whether financial incentives can address this problem. We evaluate a randomized conditional cash transfer linked to participation in the French national career guidance program for young, low-skilled jobseekers. The program was administered by local Job Youth Centers and ...
We evaluate the causal effect of an intervention that combines gender-sensitive teaching practices with the pedagogical use of Matific, a gamified mathematics platform powered by adaptive artificial intelligence, on reducing gender gaps in mathematics achievement through reductions in girls' mathematics anxiety among students in 3rd- and 6th-grade public schools in Uruguay.