AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1320 studies with locations in 106 countries.
The Iranian organ market is unique: it matches those who have kidneys they are willing to donate with those who need them, but also allows for the sale of those kidneys. The NGO which administers the market and the medical procedures involved in the transplantation have granted us access to patients prior to their operations and repeated interaction with them in the months that follow. We would like to use this opportunity to investigate the motivations of patients (and should have access to those who decide to donate and those who do not): in particular, to test both the degree of habituation to both the health and financial ramifications of the procedure and the extent to which that habituation is correctly anticipated by patients over a period of several months (before and after the ...
We conduct coordination games in order to understand how citizens' actions and expectations respond to the religious identity of their leader. Groups are randomly assigned to leaders of different religions, and their responses in the coordination game are compared. We also examine whether pre-game announcements and activities shape the responses in the coordination game.
Historically, rice is grown in fields that are flooded during most of the monsoon season. However in recent years, mainly due to the availability of tube well irrigation, rice is increasingly being planted in the dry season using shallow or deep tube well water. This trend has led to an increase in groundwater extraction and depletion of water levels in many rice-producing regions. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute have developed a technology called Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) that works on the principle that the rice plant can tolerate up to 30% less water supply during the growing season relative to conventional methods of irrigation. This technique requires embedding a perforated plastic tube to monitor the water level in the rice field, which is irr...
Voluntary worker to worker helping behavior -i.e., worker cooperation- is very important for the performance of any organization. There is a vast theoretical literature in the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary anthropology regarding the conditions and mechanisms that favor the evolution of cooperation in populations. However, extant empirical evidence comes mainly from the lab, with scant evidence coming from the field. In this project, we collaborate with three organizations in order to experimentally intervene the implementation of a workplace safety methodology that is based on voluntary cooperation by workers. In this prevention methodology, a starting group of ten workers is voluntarily created which then is trained to provide structured feedback on safety behavior ...
A key element of participatory development is the involvement of beneficiary communities in the decision-making process relative to the intervention. However, participation rates in community actions are typically low and participants are highly self-selected, with agents with higher vested interests or lower participation costs more likely to participate in the decision-making process. In this project, we study the determinants and consequences of participation and self-selection into community decision-making. The project is conducted within a randomized controlled trial which offers rural Bangladeshi communities the opportunity to build a public source of safe water. The project process requires communities to take collective decisions over key features of the project at a publi...
In information dissemination campaigns by agricultural extension services, seemingly small attributes, such as the way it is delivered or who it is delivered to, can result in significant differences in outcomes, such as knowledge transfer, adoption and yield. In the context of ICT-mediated knowledge transfer, this study investigates the role of the gender composition of the person(s) who provide the information and the gender composition of the person(s) who receive the information in making the information transfer more effective. In addition, video as a way to deliver extension information is augmented with a more demand-driven ICT solution, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR). Effectiveness is assessed in terms of knowledge gain, adoption, yield increase, and poverty reduction....
Our study presents a novel design to test the effectiveness of nonmonetary incentives and peer pressure to enforce a health policy. We will ask students and parents to sign an agreement that commits parents to monitor their children at home and penalizes the students for smoking at school. The penalty is nonmonetary in nature, thereby making it more sustainable and more easily scalable. In a subset of schools, we also introduce group competition to test the effectiveness of peer support and pressure for improving health behavior.
The increasing popularity of microfinance resulted in fierce competition in credit markets in many developing counties. Despite the favorable notion of competition in general, increased competition has led to new challenges. Recent studies find that higher levels of competition among microfinance institutions (MFIs) are related to over-indebtedness of borrowers and weakened loan repayment incentives. This might partly be driven by the absence of information sharing between lenders and the increase in competition which in turn results in greater information asymmetries in the markets. Information sharing via credit registries can thus be an important measure to improve the performance of microcredit markets and better access to credit for the poor. In this project we seek to answer the q...
How redistribution affects the real economy is one of the central, unanswered questions in development economics. The effect of redistribution on the welfare of non-beneficiary households is theoretically ambiguous: there could be positive spillover effects through increased aggregate demand (a multiplier effect), or negative spillovers from price inflation or crowd-out by business expansion for non-beneficiaries. The NGO GiveDirectly provides large cash transfers to rural households in Kenya. We utilize an RCT to study the spillover effects of cash transfers on household welfare, prices, enterprise creation and local public finance and will make use of spatial variation in treatment density in order to estimate these effects.
This document constitutes a pre-analysis plan for an experiment to be conducted in the field in India, starting in late July/early August 2017. Comparison samples are to be obtained with students in Oxford, and budget allowing, with students in Pune, India. While we tried to present a complete discussion, some of the hypotheses remain less elaborate than we had hoped for. This is due on the one hand to time pressures coming from project funding, which did not allow us to further delay the experiments. We thus had to leave this plan incomplete in order to be able to submit before seeing any signifiant amounts of data coming out of the experiment. On the other hand, this same time pressure did not allow us to fully develop our econometric approach, so that some hypotheses are formulated o...