AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12586 studies with locations in 171 countries.
Substantial gender disparities in depression and suicide rates are observed worldwide. While women are more frequently diagnosed with depression, men have a substantially higher rate of completed suicides. This project aims to investigate whether gender differences in the recognition of mental health issues and the likelihood of seeking help contribute to these patterns. The project consists of (1) an analysis of mental health diagnoses and suicide data using administrative records from Norway, and (2) an online experiment with a representative U.S. sample, aiming to identify whether mental health symptom recognition and willingness to seek help differ by gender.
The abstract is included in the uploaded pre-analysis plan document. It is not included here to prevent participants from obtaining information regarding the experiment features and treatments.
In this pre-registered online experiment I investigate how a design choice made by the vendor of an AI assistant shapes financial judgment when the underlying information is held fixed. Participants forecast a firm's future earnings and allocate a hypothetical investment after reading an earnings conference-call transcript. Using a correspondence design, I hold all financial content constant and vary only the demographic characteristics signaled by the executives' names. I cross this with random assignment to AI assistance whose content reflects different vendor design choices, including a no-assistance control. The design aims to identify whether the identity signaled by a firm's executives moves earnings forecasts and investment when fundamentals are held constant, and whether the ven...
We investigate the impact of a group loan product and a smartphone application for savings groups members in Malawi and Uganda. Linking savings groups with financial service providers could alleviate financial barriers for many savings groups participants who tend to be relatively poor, rural, and with limited access to capital. Meanwhile, digital ledgers, managed via a smartphone application, could solve many of the operational challenges faced by savings groups in recording transactions in a physical group ledger or individual passbooks, and could help improve the availability of financial information to formal credit providers. The partners, including IPA, are working together to determine if economic and social wellbeing increases as a result of these two interventions.
Childhood lead exposure remains a major public health problem in low- and middle-income countries, where around half of children have elevated blood lead levels that can cause lifelong harm to their health and development. A key challenge in addressing this problem is the limited evidence on which lead sources contribute most to child exposure, and therefore which interventions are likely to be effective. This study addresses this gap by experimentally evaluating the effects of removing two commonly contaminated household products — cookware and traditional eyeliner — on children's blood lead levels. We randomly assign 300 households in Ghana's Northern Region, a known lead exposure hotspot, to receive lead-free replacements for contaminated cookware, contaminated eyeliner, both product...
This project evaluates the scale-up of Semillas de Apego, a community-based psychosocial program designed to restore caregiver mental health and protect early childhood development in conflict-affected and displaced communities. The program targets caregivers of children aged 0–5, a group disproportionately exposed to trauma and adversity. While nurturing care is critical for protecting children’s development, traumatic stress impairs caregivers’ mental health and their capacity to emotionally connect with their children. Semillas de Apego addresses this by promoting caregiver mental health as both an outcome and a pathway for protecting early childhood development in humanitarian contexts. Developed by Universidad de los Andes and the Child Trauma Research Program at UCSF, the progr...
This study examines how access to generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools affects student learning outcomes in higher education. Using a randomized controlled experiment, we assign undergraduate students to complete learning tasks on unfamiliar academic topics either with or without access to generative AI tools. The experiment consists of two sessions approximately one week apart, allowing us to measure both immediate performance and longer-term knowledge retention. In the first session, participants complete a baseline assessment, engage in a structured learning exercise on an assigned topic, and produce a written analysis. Only participants in the treatment group are permitted to use generative AI during this process. In the second session, all participants complete knowledge r...
There is growing recognition of the importance of soft skills in improving young people’s labor market outcomes. However, rigorous measurement of specific soft skills in the context of a large-scale field study is often challenging, and hence there is little evidence on the levels of some such skills among vulnerable youth populations, as well as potential gender gaps in such skills. Moreover, there is little causal evidence as to which skills or sets of skills are most malleable in late adolescence and early adulthood, and which may have the highest labor-market returns for such populations. This study will deploy novel measures of key soft skills with a sample of young male and female adults in urban and peri-urban Tanzania. Building on recent advances in psychology and behavioral eco...
This study examines how people assess job candidates in a recruitment-style decision-making task. Participants will review a candidate’s response to a logical reasoning problem and evaluate the candidate’s performance and underlying ability. The study varies selected features of the recruitment context and the background information shown to participants before they make their evaluations. The findings will provide evidence on how information about the prior evaluation process affects judgments of candidate quality.
This study aims to understand the extent to which people’s quality of decision making and their ability to engage in strategic interaction are related to cooperation in repeated games. Existing research indicates that the quality of decision-making, alongside cognitive ability, significantly influences crucial real-world outcomes, including wealth accumulation. While there is a growing literature on the influence of cognitive ability on strategic behaviour and cooperation in repeated games (including work by collaborators in this project) there is a notable research gap regarding the impact of decision-making quality on cooperation. We use adherence to GARP (the generalized axiom of revealed preference) as our benchmark of decision-making quality.