AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12869 studies with locations in 172 countries.
Indiana lags behind national averages in terms of foster child reunification rates and time to permanency, and is currently one of only six states that does not guarantee direct legal representation for any youth in foster care. Legal representation for children in foster care could shorten out-of-home placement duration by reducing unnecessary removals or placement changes, expediting steps that support timely reunification, and providing an adult confidante trained to advocate for and provide legal counsel to foster youth. This study evaluates the impact of legal representation for youth in the child welfare system. We will identify impact by randomly allocating access to legal counsel provided by Child Advocates, an Indiana-based nonprofit organization. Eligible youth will be randomi...
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...
Food systems have far-reaching impacts that result in public health costs and environmental damage which are not reflected in retail prices, but are borne implicitly by society. True Cost Accounting has emerged as a framework for making these costs visible, and is increasingly invoked to justify food policies that reduce public health and environmental costs. Yet operationalization of true cost food policies to date has focused almost entirely on consumers - on true cost labels and true pricing at the point of purchase - while a central element of its proposed theory of change remains untested: whether communicating these costs to the public affects support for the policy instruments that would mitigate and internalize the true cost of food in practice. On 27 September 2026, Swiss citi...
This within-subject Prolific experiment investigates how cognitive complexity drives choices over lotteries and so-called deterministic mirrors. The experiment comprises two blocks. In the first, replicating Oprea (2024), subjects choose between certain rewards, lotteries, and deterministic mirrors using multiple price lists. In the second, subjects encounter the same objects but are instead asked to provide the expected value of the lottery or the absolute value of the deterministic mirror and are paid based on accuracy. Within this block, we elicit five complexity measures—number of mistakes, deviations from the correct answer, confidence, decision times, and willingness-to-accept complexity costs to avoid doing the task—across three conditions: lotteries, deterministic mirrors, and a...
While mobile phones are increasingly widespread in Sub Saharan Africa, there remains no accompanying service like the Yellow Pages that allows phone users to find new mobile numbers at low cost. This study will test the impacts of reducing the cost of search for information by providing farmers a directory with the contact information of businesses in the Kagera region of Northwestern Tanzania. The study will test the differential impacts of a digital phone-based versus a paper-based directory, and will test for heterogeneous effects based on baseline networks. The primary outcomes relate to phone usage, search behavior, investment, prices, income-generating activities, and various measures of extra-village contact and trade over space.
We conduct an online experiment where subjects make two types of choices: one involving monetary lotteries and another involving riskless alternatives, the values of which can be computed through simple mathematical operations. The objective of the study is to evaluate whether subjects display similar behaviors in these two environments and to understand why.
We conduct a field experiment in cooperation with an energy efficiency assistance program in Germany. As part of that program, the participating low-income households receive a letter informing them about eligibility for a voucher for replacing their old refrigerator against a new, efficient one. We complement that information letter by three types of nudges. Following classic behavioral economic research, the nudges introduce a gain vs. a loss framing to the information letter. Further, we adopt simplified versions (both in terms of icons and in terms of a checklist) to ease the cognitive burden the low-income households may experience. We study the effect of the nudges on (i) the likelihood that the household requests the voucher and (ii) the likelihood that the household invests in e...
Essential public-sector workers in low- and middle-income countries (teachers, health workers, police officers) operate under chronic stress, exposure to community violence, and institutional neglect of their mental health. Burnout, anxiety, and untreated trauma are pervasive among these frontline workers, yet rigorous evidence on scalable interventions to support their wellbeing remains nearly nonexistent. This gap matters not only to the workers themselves, but also to the quality of public services they deliver. We provide experimental evidence on whether socio-emotional resilience training can improve the mental health and professional effectiveness of essential workers, focusing on public school teachers in Guatemala. We evaluate SanaMente, a trauma-informed training program that b...
The research team will be partnering with the American Economic Association to launch a three-year randomized controlled trial of the effects of author-anonymized peer reviewing, commonly referred to as "double-blind." This evaluation will involve the AER, AER: Insights, and the four American Economic Journals. In the treatment group, information revealing author identities will be excluded from materials provided to reviewers, and reviewers will be asked to refrain from seeking them out through web searches or other means. The experiment will test the effects of removing author identities from the information routinely provided to reviewers, while recognizing that reviewers may become aware of author identities in other ways. Key outcomes that will be examined include (1) autho...
This field experiment studies whether managers can be trained to use charismatic communication to mobilize collective action and foster cooperative workplace behavior. The study involves 104 managers and their employees in a microfinance company in Kyrgyzstan. After baseline surveys and a baseline speech video, managers are randomized to one of two half-day leadership trainings. The treatment provides practical training in concrete, learnable charismatic leadership communication tactics. The active-comparison training covers closely related leadership concepts but does not train managers in the same concrete behavioral communication techniques. A distinctive feature of the study is a repeated panel of structured, task-specific managerial communication episodes. In addition to the basel...