AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12586 studies with locations in 171 countries.
This project uses a survey experiment to shed light on the effects of future income shocks on households’ decisions within the unique context of the Canadian mortgage market. It aims to inform the effects on aggregate demand and financial stability of increases in nominal interest rates. The current Canadian context provides a unique natural experiment: over the past four years, nominal interest rates have surged from historic lows – leading to significant mortgage debt accumulation – to rapid increases due to inflation surge. Unlike the US and most of Europe, Canadian mortgage rates are typically fixed for no more than five years, resulting in substantial negative payment shocks upon renewal. Exploiting the variation in the timing and size of the shocks further allows a quasi-random ma...
This study investigates the role of information frictions in explaining why jobseekers do not fill understaffed jobs. To do so, we design a low-cost informational intervention in cooperation with a Public Employment Service in Belgium. The intervention aims at addressing potential information frictions faced by jobseekers when making decisions about training. Specifically, the intervention consists in communicating, to a random subset of recent UI recipients, information on the advantages of following a training (and searching for a job) in a shortage occupation. We then study whether directly providing this information to jobseekers by email has an impact on their likelihood of following a training in (and ultimately entering) a shortage occupation.
What is the willingness to pay for reliable electricty among rural consumers in developing countries, and how responsive is demand to changes in the price of electricity? Electrification is a major growth policy challenge for developing countries, as it requires large investments in infrastructure while consumers' and producers' willingness to pay for electricity in low income countries remains largely unknown. These challenges are exacerbated in rural areas, where potential consumers of electricity tend to be poorer and the costs of extending access to the grid higher than in urban markets. I use a randomized control trial (RCT) with customers of a pay as you go (PAYG) solar company in Rwanda and Kenya to study demand for electricity among rural consumers by randomly varying the effect...
This study examines whether recipient control over benefit timing improves outcomes in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), which distributes $4 billion annually to approximately 6 million vulnerable U.S. households. Current LIHEAP implementation delivers benefits as administrator-controlled lump-sum payments, and our objective is to understand whether enabling recipients to allocate benefits across utility bills throughout the year via an energy savings account leads to improved outcomes with respect to disconnection rates, on-time payments, energy consumption, and arrearages.
Financial education is widely promoted as a tool to improve household financial outcomes, yet rigorous evidence on whether it translates into measurable improvements in credit behaviour remains limited — particularly for financially vulnerable populations and digital delivery channels. This study evaluates the causal impact of targeted financial education on credit outcomes, financial literacy, and financial wellbeing among users of a financial technology platform. The intervention is implemented as a randomized controlled trial in which eligible FinTech app users are invited to participate. Baseline data on financial capability, financial wellbeing, and socio-demographic characteristics are collected through a survey and combined with administrative credit records. Approximately 9,0...
As demographic ageing intensifies fiscal pressures, understanding public preferences for redistribution is vital to sustaining social security systems and anticipating inequality—both in Japan and beyond. This study investigates how individuals’ awareness of their relative income position influences their views on fairness, inequality, and redistribution. To address this question, we implement a randomised information intervention survey in collaboration with a Japanese municipality. The survey is linked to administrative tax records, allowing respondents to be informed of their actual income rank within local reference groups. Treated individuals receive information on their rank within demographic cohorts. This design builds on and extends the findings of Hvidberg et al. (2023), s...
Governments and development agencies routinely conduct evaluations as part of their workflow. However, this knowledge may not feed back to future policymaking due to information overload. The rise of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence provides a perfect solution to expedite policy learning. However, whether and how these AI agents facilities the use of evidence in policymaking remains untested. To address this question, we examine whether access to a generative AI platform powered by a domain-specific LLM improves the use of evidence in the policymaking process among government officials in Sri Lanka.
Advice as verbal communication, plays an important role in the functioning of organizations but is hard to assess and measure precisely. In this study we plan to measure advice-giving ability of individuals in a novel abstract setting by randomly assigning advice from a singlw advisor to many advisees, resulting in a quantitative measure of advice-giving skill. Then for the same advisors we will measure their advice-giving in a more naturalistic setting, resulting in a qualitative measure of advice-giving skill. We will explore if the quantitative measure and the qualitative measure correlate strongly, despite different surface features, a positive finding would suggest that we are measuring a real, transferable individual difference. Moreover, we will explore if advising skill is dist...
The adoption of green technology in developing countries is essential for sustainable development. However, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for green technology remains low in many of these regions. Traditional WTP assessments do not adequately capture the complexities of credit-based purchases, where payments are distributed over time and agents are time-inconsistent and credit constrained. This project evaluates WTP for credit-based purchases over two dimensions of down payment and repayments, with a focus on affordable clean energy solutions. By understanding how small business owners value credit purchases, we can better design and implement green technology initiatives and subsidy policies targeting similar products and further evaluate the impact of clean-energy product adoption on busin...
This study tests whether providing local government officials with better information and non-financial recognition can improve the allocation of public drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh. Naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater affects tens of millions of people in Bangladesh and poses major health and economic risks. Each year, the government installs a limited number of deep wells to provide arsenic-safe water, but these wells are not always placed where they would benefit the most people. In this randomized controlled trial, 200 Union Chairpersons, who dictate the allocation of governmental wells within their jurisdiction, are cross-randomized into either receiving an access to a web-based planning tool and/or receiving an incentive to prioritize high-arsenic regions wit...