AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11945 studies with locations in 170 countries.
We collaborate with Trip.com to pilot a "Flexible Personal Leave" policy within the firm: Employees may optionally apply for additional unpaid personal leave without providing specific justification, subject to completed work handover (unpaid leave, benefits unchanged, pilot cap: 45 days/year per person). Trip wants to introduce this as they believes it will attract employees and improve retention as many employees will find this extremely valuable. We aim to assess the take-up and effects of this policy, in particular, how take-up varies across demographics, employee seniority and position, etc., and how the policy affects worker productivity and promotion, firm recruitment and retention, etc.
This is a follow-up to our initial preregistration with identifier AEARCTR-0015630. We propose an experiment on cheap talk. A receiver guesses a secret number, and receives advice from a sender with misaligned incentives. In our initial experiment we had three treatment conditions that varied whether the sender can provide informed advice and how cognitively demanding the receiver finds it to respond to the advice in a sophisticated way. We observed that receivers reacted heterogeneously to informed advice. In this follow-up, we investigate mechanisms behind the observed heterogeneous effects.
While experimental evidence supports the effectiveness of parenting interventions, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based parenting interventions on caregivers and children remains understudied. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether AI-assisted parenting guidance can improve caregivers’ parenting mental health, stress, and self-efficacy, as well as early childhood developmental outcomes in rural China. In a pre-existing center-based parenting program in rural China, we randomly assign 20 centers (over 1000 registered caregiver-child dyads) to treatment and control arms. In the treatment centers, caregivers are encouraged to use an AI application integrated with a comprehensive curriculum covering six domains on early childhood development: psychological development, nutrit...
Female labor force participation in Pakistan is among the lowest in the world. Many working women are engaged in home-based, informal employment in the garment sector, where they earn low wages and lack protections against exploitation by contractors. We study the role of intra-household misaligned beliefs in shaping women’s labor supply decisions, focusing on whether incorrect perceptions about husbands’ support for outside employment act as a barrier to formal work. In April 2025 (our baseline), we surveyed 301 home-based working women in Lahore along with their spouses, to elicit wives’ and husbands’ preferences for home-based versus outside-home work, as well as their beliefs of their spouse’s preferences. The survey provided evidence of misalignment in intra-household preferences a...
India's Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme (RDSS) is deploying AI-assisted automated metering infrastructure across 42 electricity distribution utilities (DISCOMs) to target 250 million smart meter installations. The tasks automated by these systems, including physical meter reading, manual billing, and field-based fault detection, define the routine occupational core of an estimated three to four million contractual workers in the Indian electricity distribution sector. Unlike permanent DISCOM employees protected by the Industrial Disputes Act 1947, contractual workers have no statutory redundancy protection and are the primary channel through which AI-induced displacement will materialise. This study evaluates whether a structured job-matching intervention can mitigate the employment...
How social ties are formed, maintained, and mobilized has changed with the adoption of digital communication technologies like WhatsApp. This paper estimates the value individuals place on the communication infrastructure that sustains their social networks and examines the short-run causal effects of losing access to it on social capital and well-being. We conduct a field experiment in three remote island communities in Indonesia, recruiting approximately 1,200 household heads as participants. To elicit individuals’ willingness to accept compensation for a one-week restriction on WhatsApp usage, we implement the double-bounded dichotomous choice (DBDC) method. Participants are then randomly assigned to a treatment group, in which WhatsApp access is blocked for one week, or to a contro...
Agricultural burning is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, yet it remains widespread in many low- and middle-income countries due to limited access to viable alternatives. This study examines whether a market-based intervention that relaxes key constraints can reduce agricultural burning among smallholder farmers. Using a randomized controlled trial with 1,024 farmers in Thailand, the study tests whether improving access to alternative markets for crop residues affects farmers’ decisions to burn or sell their residues.
This study examines how individuals adjust their financial behaviour when faced with a sudden liquidity shock combined with changes in tax enforcement. In a laboratory experiment, participants repeatedly allocate income between a formal, taxed deposit account and an informal, untaxed cash holding. In each round, participants must finance a mandatory expenditure by allocating payments between deposits and cash. Expenditure from cash is subject to a friction cost, capturing the relative difficulty of using cash compared to digital payment methods. The experimental design compares behaviour across three treatments: a baseline with no shock, an unanticipated shock, and a pre-announced shock. In both unanticipated shock and preannounced shock treatments, a policy intervention invalidates ac...
In this online field experiment, we study whether peer-to-peer referrals increase take-up of a talent recognition program: the Academic Excellence Awards at a private university in Colombia. Students are eligible to participate if their GPA is at least 4.0 on a 5-point grading scale. The award selection process consists of four online steps designed to assess a broader set of skills than academic performance alone. In a first phase, all eligible students are invited to complete a short survey for high-achieving students. At the end of the survey, respondents can nominate up to four peers whom they believe should be invited to participate in the award selection process. Students who submit at least one referral are the “seeds” in our referral experiment. In a second phase, eligible nomin...
Cash Transfers directed to disadvantaged high school graduates can alleviate liquidity constraints, allowing them to search longer for a better job match or to use the transfer for additional educational investments. However, transfer gains may not reach their full transformative potential if the barriers shaping post-graduation decisions are multidimensional. Informational frictions on the returns to higher education programs and a lack of information on financial planning can lead to suboptimal investments that would be beneficial for students´ future careers. Students may also face behavioral frictions- such as low self-confidence and self-efficacy, present-bias and lack of aspirations, resulting in suboptimal job-search effort and educational/occupational choices. We plan to conduct...