AEA RCT Registry currently lists 10206 studies with locations in 170 countries.
Remedial education and differentiated instruction are promising approaches to tackle the low learning levels that plague many low- and middle-income countries. However, little is known about how to promote these strategies at scale. Researchers are evaluating the impact of the “Teaching at the Right Level” program on students’ foundational literacy and mathematics skills. The program—which runs in Zambia’s public primary schools and is locally known as “Catch Up”—divides children into groups based on their learning needs and pace and adds extra time during which teachers provide tailored instruction to each group. The study also investigates the effectiveness of combining the Catch Up program with a continuous professional development program for teachers. This trial was first registere...
In the context of the rising costs of healthcare, our study seeks to address a key component of input costs in hospital systems: the costs of supplies used in surgical procedures. Physicians are given substantial autonomy in the way they perform medical procedures including the choice of which supplies to use during treatment. This autonomy is an integral part of the organizational design of most hospitals, as it is thought that decentralization puts decision rights in the hands of the most informed agents. However, doctors are not typically incentivized to reduce costs and thus often select expensive supplies even when less expensive options exist. Our project uses several interventions to encourage doctors to select lower cost, but equal quality, supplies. Our interventions include (1...
Does youth service cause shifts in beliefs, mindsets, and career trajectory? More specifically, are youth service participants more likely to exhibit “pro-social” behaviors and pursue “pro-social” occupations? Does participation increase their self-efficacy, empathy, and cross-cultural capacity? To date, the question of the effects of youth service programs fosters the virtues and practices that strong liberal democracies require has been elusive because of a selection bias problem. When an individual participates in a youth service organization, is it because that individual is already a good citizen? Or does participation in a youth service experience indeed change participants? This research program overcomes this selection bias hurdle to answer this question, studying an internat...
Following replications of an experiment, we show how Bayes Factor Functions can be used to update our beliefs about a) whether an effect exists and b) the magnitude of the effect. We compare this to Butera et al. (2020), who show how to use a method introduced by Maniadis et al. (2015) to calculate Post-Study Probabilities that an effect exists, following a new replication of an experiment. We conduct several replications of the seminal Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990) experiment as an illustrative example.
In a previous survey we studies how much individuals are willing to pay for different news articles depending on group identities (https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.13097-1.1). We also examined the implications of news avoidance and news exposure on attitudes and beliefs. In this survey experiment, we focus on beliefs regarding the conflict and mechanisms found in the first experiment
Agricultural insurance allows farmers to mitigate risk from adverse weather shocks, preventing systematic underinvestment in agriculture, and smooth consumption ex-post. High transaction costs have inhibited agricultural insurance markets in developing countries. While supply has improved with the availability of new technology, demand for insurance remains stubbornly low at around 10\% even in the presence of subsidies (Carter et al 2017). In a traditional insurance contract, insurers collect premium payments at the beginning of a growing season when farmers face less liquidity, and disburse compensation for losses over an often unannounced period post-harvest. Evidence shows that adoption of insurance is lower among those with inadequate liquidity to make large upfront premium payment...
In emerging markets and developing countries, inflation expectations are often less anchored, primarily attributed to the lack of credible monetary policy. We first test whether this fact holds in the context of Senegal, which has a relatively credible monetary framework characterized by a fixed exchange rate peg to the Euro and monetary policy historically monitored by the Bank of France and administered by the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO). To assess how well-anchored expectations are, we elicit households’ short- and medium-term inflation expectations. Next, we examine how macroeconomic shocks and uncertainty in the form of fiscal shocks (budget shocks) and government interventions (price controls) affect the anchoring of inflation expectations by providing randomized i...
Overplacement has been established across a wide variety of domains (Zell, Strickhouser, Sedikides & Alicke, 2020), including personal saving outcomes (Prins, Rosenkranz & van Dijk, in preparation). In this study we aim to get a better understanding of the consequences of biased placement beliefs about saving behavior. Specifically, we investigate the effects of an information treatment that aims to diminish biased placement beliefs on subsequent placement beliefs and on saving intentions. In an online survey experiment we therefore first measure respondents’ initial placement beliefs. Next, the treatment group receives information about the actual savings of the median household that is similar to the respondents’ household. The information treatment therefore teaches respondents wheth...
Cunningham and de Quidt (2024) introduced a theoretical framework for identifying implicit preferences. We apply this framework to empirically examine explicit and implicit preferences in food consumption. While many individuals express explicit preferences for organic food products likely due to self and social image concerns, their purchasing behavior often reflects preferences for cheaper conventional alternatives. To explore this discrepancy, we will conduct an incentivized laboratory experiment where participants state their willingness to pay (WTP) for cooked, colored eggs presented side-by-side in three joint evaluations. By systematically varying product attributes (organic versus conventional and an additional attribute, the painting types), we test whether individuals adhere t...
We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. Across three treatment conditions, we vary whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. This allows us to identify how receivers reason about the sender's advice and whether honesty-related concerns can explain overcommunication and systematic belief bias.