AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12214 studies with locations in 170 countries.
Lead exposure from drinking water remains a critical public health concern in the U.S., primarily driven by lead service lines (LSLs)—lead pipes connecting water mains to buildings. Because LSL inventories offer only a proxy for household-level exposure, as tap water lead levels vary with pipe condition and corrosion control, we are motivated to investigate the following three questions. (1) How does receiving public information that serves as a proxy for pollution exposure affect individuals’ beliefs about personal exposure and confidence in those beliefs? (2) How does it affect willingness to pay (WTP) for mitigation measures? (3) How does it affect WTP for individualized exposure assessments? Leveraging the newly released LSL inventories, we conduct a survey experiment to study how...
A rural-urban digital divide persists in the United States, despite significant efforts and successes in closing the gap, exacerbating uneven access to education, employment, healthcare, and innovation. As artificial intelligence (AI) has become a larger factor in our daily lives, this digital divide has spilled over into a rural-urban AI-divide, with urban adults of working age using AI at twice the rate of their rural counterparts. But the AI-divide may not be fully explained by differential access. This work uses an experimental design with random assignment to identify motivational aspects of the rural-urban AI-divide. In the study, participants engage in two rounds of an online task. In the first round, participants learn how to use a Caesar cipher to encode a word. In the second r...
Access to high quality healthcare is a critical driver of human capital and a cornerstone of broader individual and societal well-being. In Uganda, rural access to health care and to essential medicines remains a persistent challenge; although 86% of Ugandans live in rural areas, only 15-20% of the country’s doctors work in those same areas, which contributes to poorer health outcomes among rural populations. Aside from a few irregular, one-day “mobile clinics” or sponsored medical missions, there are few resources in place for delivering healthcare on a regular basis to people in remote areas. We partnered with Health Access Connect (HAC), a Ugandan-based NGO that coordinates monthly, financially self-sustainable outreach visits by clinical staff from government health facilities to ru...
This study is a survey-based randomized experiment among young adults in Germany who completed their schooling in Baden-Württemberg and belong to birth cohorts from October 2001 to September 2007. It exploits the introduction of the independent school subject “Wirtschaft, Berufs- und Studienorientierung” (WBS), which was implemented across all school types in Baden-Württemberg in the 2016/2017 school year. To this end, a representative sample of selected birth cohorts is drawn and surveyed, allowing for a comparison between individuals in cohorts affected by the curriculum reform and individuals from cohorts who completed schooling before the reform. The study has two main objectives: first, to identify the medium- to longer-term effects of the education reform on financial behavior aft...
The ongoing transformation of the labor market driven by demographic and technological changes has a significant impact on both labor supply and skill demand, potentially resulting in skills mismatches. One way to address this is to continuously invest in human capital throughout one's working life – a concept promoted by policymakers worldwide. However, before designing effective programs, it is important to understand how decisions about on-the-job training are formed. The aim of this project is to improve our understanding of how training decisions are made in German establishments. We develop and test hypotheses on previously underexplored factors that influence both managers' and employees' training investment decisions. In the first part of our project (AEARCTR-0016440), we ...
We study how informational advantage (cheap talk) and narrative persuasion interact in the same experimental setting. In an inference task, receivers observe a dataset and make predictions after receiving a message from a sender who may have additional information and who communicates either through a simple recommendation or an elaborate narrative explanation. By varying the sender’s information and communication mode, we isolate the effects of new information versus new interpretation. We examine how the effects of these message types differ based on whether the senders and receivers have aligned or misaligned preferences. This allows us to test predictions from models of strategic information transmission and competing narratives, and to assess when persuasion works through informati...
We study how monetary policy transmits to firms' beliefs, expectations, and plans and how this transmission is shaped by the preferences of firm executives. We do so via a customized survey among firms in the Netherlands that allows us to apply both event study and RCT methods.
This study examines whether brief, structured exposure to present- or future-oriented thinking shapes feelings of hope and hopelessness among women entrepreneurs in Haiti, and whether hope and hopelessness in turn affect their resilience, willingness to act, and intention to keep pursuing their business goals. Participants are women entrepreneurs enrolled in a women's entrepreneurship training program in Haiti. The study embeds a randomized experiment within a two-module training program. All participants receive the first module, a financial literacy and management session with no temporal framing. Participants are then randomly assigned to one of three conditions for the second module, a session on women's leadership and climate resilience: (1) a version framed around their current...
There is ample evidence of low contraceptive uptake and unmet need for family planning by mentally vulnerable individuals. At the same time, avoiding unwanted pregnancies for this group may be especially important to improve their (mental) well-being, autonomy and self-reliance. Impacts of large-scale family planning counselling programs specifically targeted at vulnerable groups with mental health issues in high-income countries are understudied. I study the effects of a national family planning support program in the Netherlands that integrates tailored family planning counselling in existing systems for the provision of mental and physical healthcare as well as targeted social care for vulnerable youth and adults. I study the program's impacts on its intended outcomes: contraceptive ...
This laboratory experiment investigates the empirical robustness of dynamic solution concepts when the assumption of common belief in rationality is relaxed. Using the framework of Approximate Common Beliefs in Rationality (ACBR), we test the result that we establish a theoretical equivalence between static rationalizability and dynamic p-rationalizability, regardless how dynamic rationality is defined. This implies that even the slightest doubt about others' rationality (p<1) renders dynamic reasoning essentially static. We implement a within-subject design using a battery of games where Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPNE) and our concept of Approximate Equilibrium provide diverging predictions. Specifically, we introduce a version of the game in Figure 4 of Reny (1992), where these ...