AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1408 studies with locations in 110 countries.
The City of Philadelphia Mayor’s Office and the Philadelphia Youth Network are partnering to conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of WorkReady, a summer jobs program for disadvantaged youth. Recent evidence from random-assignment studies shows that summer jobs programs in New York City and Chicago dramatically reduce violence involvement among participants, but have small, if any, effects on education and employment. The Philadelphia study is intended to 1) assess how generalizable the prior findings are by testing the crime, employment, and school effects of a different summer jobs program in a new setting (pending data availability), and 2) to better understand mechanisms by expanding tests for program effects to other socially-costly correlates of violence tha...
Recent technological developments enable online job platforms to match workers to employers not only across oceans but also across traffic-riddled cities. In Indonesia today, more than one million workers in both urban and rural areas are engaged in online labor markets across a range of domestic and international platforms. This pilot study to investigate whether online jobs can substitute for geographic mobility by allowing individuals to compete and work in virtual job markets.
The choice to study at university is influenced by the socio-economic status (SES) background of students, holding constant ability and other observable factors. In Germany, there is a gap of 21 percentage points based on SES background of students regarding the decision to study for a Bachelor’s degree. This gap widens by another 11 to 17 percentage points at the transition from undergraduate (Bachelor's) to postgraduate (Master's) studies. The exact size of the gap remains debated and might partly be explained by differences between low- and high-SES background students, which are usually unobserved to the researcher. Nevertheless, increasing the share of low-SES background students at university is an important objective of German higher education policy (and worldwide). This study...
Within a large retail chain, we randomly assign store managers to either a performance-contingent bonus or a fixed bonus payment. The performance-contingent bonus is based on the store’s profit contribution margin (= sales - costs of goods sold - inventory shrinkage - personnel costs).
Loans to purchase new assets sometimes use the new assets themselves as collateral, as in car or home loans in the developed world. Other loans—especially in developing countries —instead require using existing assets as collateral. We hypothesize that the endowment effect (Kahneman et al. 1990) causes consumers to dislike placing existing assets at risk by promising them as collateral. This might drive down take-up of loans collateralized using existing assets, relative to collateralizing with new assets (which may not yet have entered the reference point). The proposed project will test this mechanism using a randomized experiment in Kenya. A secondary goal will be to test whether borrowers anticipate that new assets might themselves eventually enter the reference point, becoming subj...
Recent experimental studies show that behavior in distributional situations can be traced back to a variety of fairness ideals and that the majority of people can be characterized as meritocrats distinguishing between personal factors (effort and talent) and impersonal factors (luck) when it comes to the attribution of responsibility for an outcome. However, in many situations the extend to which an achievement is determined by an individual's performance or luck is not directly observable and often remains unknown. In this project, we therefore aim to answer the following research question: What happens to people's willingness to redistribute earnings if there exists uncertainty about the role of luck and merit in the production of these earnings?
Using text messages to motivate, inform, and remind individuals at key moments has shown to be a promising research area. We seek to answer whether the delivery mechanism of text messages can be effectively used to leverage students' social support network. A substantial literature shows that adolescents who with supportive parents, peers and teachers do better in school than those who cannot identify such sources of support. This study harnesses these relationships to improve student attainment. The process is as follows; students nominate one or two ‘study supporters’ via a short online survey - people whom they communicate with often and who support them. Students are subsequently individually randomised to one of the following arms: (1) control (2) study supporter receives messages,...
Large-scale assessments have allowed policy-makers, researchers, and the general public to compare learning outcomes across (national and sub-national) school systems and over time. This study examines whether they can achieve another equally-important goal: to provide useful information to improve school management and/or classroom instruction. We present experimental evidence on the impact of the use of large-scale assessments for diagnostic feedback and capacity-building. We randomly assigned 105 public primary schools in the province of La Rioja, Argentina to: (a) a diagnostic feedback group in which we administered standardized tests in math and Spanish at baseline and two follow-ups and made their results available to the schools through user-friendly reports; (b) a capacity-build...
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest means-tested cash transfer program in the United States, and accounts for a significant share of income for those who receive it. As opposed to most other federal and state transfer programs, the credit is disbursed only once a year, resulting in uneven cash flow for recipients that may undermine their economic security. Interestingly however, past programs that have offered a distributed payment schedule have suffered from low take-up. The purpose of this research is to explore the determinants of demand for, and the effects of, a novel periodic EITC payment program. In cooperation with the Center for Economic Progress, researchers will first conduct pilot activities to learn more about demand for periodic payment and how best to imple...
We perform a field experiment in order to study how feedback about one’s performance as compared to its peers can shape the educational outcomes of university students. We consider two types of feedback, feedback regarding an input (study effort) and an output (intermediate grades). We distinguish between new and incumbent students in order to study heterogeneous treatment effects.