AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2143 studies with locations in 124 countries.
Starting from Niederle and Vesterlund (2007), a large number of lab experiments report that men are more likely to enter tournaments. We aim to test whether advising women to compete more and advising men to compete less decreases the gender gap in willingness to compete. We use three different forms of advice that emphasize the role of competitiveness, risk preferences and overconfidence respectively. We will investigate both the average effect across the three forms, and the effect of each form on its own.
Correct attribution of responsibility for economic outcomes is one of the key assumptions underlying citizens’ ability to hold politicians accountable: It allows citizens to use punishment and reward strategies to discipline politicians and to prevent them from introducing policies that contravene the preferences of the electoral majority. This project seeks to empirically assess whether (potentially biased) source of information can affect public perception’s of re- sponsibility in non-democratic setting. That is to answer whether government which controls large part of media in autocracies, can effectively shift public attribution of responsibility and therefore allocation of blame and credit for public policy outcomes. To tackle this question I propose a panel factorial survey experi...
This study examines the long-run impact of microfinance contracts with a grace period on borrowers’ income and their children’s outcomes. It is based on a field experiment conducted in 2007 that found that grace periods increase household income by 20% after three years. We analyze whether this has led to investments in children’s education and health outcomes. To do this, we tracked the quality and quantity of schooling throughout the lifetime of the children and also the children’s health outcomes, marriage outcomes, occupation, and wages in a 10-year follow-up survey.
In many developing countries educational access has increased since 2000, yet learning levels remain disturbingly low. This study used an RCT in Pakistan to test a novel middle school intervention that briefly trained teachers on pedagogical techniques and provided classrooms with video content to enhance middle school students' achievement in grade level mathematics and science. We test students using an exam designed specifically for the study. We also test the impact of the program on scores in a provincial standardized test, which all students take for admission into public high schools. We measure and test the programs impact on student and teacher attendance, and other measures of student and teacher effort.
We define a class of donations termed quantity donations and present evidence from an online field experiment on whether well-known results from the literature on subsidizing charitable giving generalize to this class. In the quantity donation, donors choose how many units of a charitable good to fund, rather than the amount of money to give. With this small modification, we find that rebate and matching subsidies are equally effective in raising funds, which contrasts the common result of matches being superior. This outcome masks a higher likelihood of giving under rebates and larger donations under matches. A third subsidy type framed as discount off the per-unit price of the charitable good is just as effective. Our findings challenge the generalizability of established results on s...
The study will assess the impact of a preschool snack added to the current school meal program in Armenia. The assessment will be based on a randomized controlled trial [RCT] in three provinces with relatively high poverty levels and high rates of under 5 anemia. This will allow a causal assessment of this component of the school feeding project. The initial round of the RCT will focus on assessing the fluid intelligence of 0 grade students at midmorning. The same group of children (around 1200 students) will again be tested near the end of the school year (Spring 2019) to assess crystallized intelligence, that is, tests that are designed to assess school readiness.
Past research has found price discrimination in B2C markets, where buyers are end customers. There is limited study on suppliers’ price quoting behavior and price discrimination on B2B markets. It is unclear whether characteristics of B2B buyers, who are often representatives of firms and not the end customers,would influence suppliers’ pricing decisions. In this research, we investigate whether there exists wholesale price discrimination, by conducting randomized field experiments on Alibaba.com, the world largest online global trade platform. We find that there is no significant difference in the wholesale prices quoted by suppliers to U.S. and South Africa buyers. We also find that suppliers quote a significantly higher wholesale price to White buyers t...
We will partner with a cotton outgrown farming company in Zambia to test a program that allows farmers to take an advance on their harvest earnings during the lean season. We will measure impacts on company profits, on recipient labor allocation and income, and on spillovers to ineligible households via prices and wages. The study is designed to test the scaling potential of findings from Fink et al. (2018) and investigate the general equilibrium effects of lowering lean season interest rates for selected households in a labor market.
We run a large-scale RCT to understand the behavioural processes that guide decisions to vaccinate. The experiment varies the text of postal letters send to individuals eligible for free influenza vaccines. The experiment is run in collaboration with the municipal health authorities in six different municipalities with historically high and low influenza vaccine coverage.
Recent decades have seen vast expansions of public health services across much of the developing world. But the quality of these services is often lacking, limiting their ultimate impact on the world’s poor. While many factors contribute to service delivery problems, one important factor is governance. The incentives that shape frontline service provider performance, training, oversight, and management all play an important role in the quality of healthcare provided by any health system. Transparency and accountability (T/A) techniques—such as social audits, public expenditure tracking surveys, citizen report cards, absenteeism studies, and community scorecards—are increasingly seen as one potential solution to some of these problems in that they allow communities to identify breakdowns...