AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12443 studies with locations in 171 countries.
The aim of our study is to test two competing theories on what people learn about their own self-control problems in settings where they repeatedly perform an action (“task”) with immediate, known costs and delayed benefits. Agents with self-control problems are expected to do fewer tasks and therefore perform lower than they initially planned. While sophisticated agents predict this behavior correctly, naive agents predict they will stick to their initial plan. We vary across treatments whether the task’s benefit is known right from the start (control treatment) or uncertain (main treatment). In the latter case, people initially only know an interval that contains the task benefit. They get repeated signals about the task benefit that, in principle, allow for learning its exact realiza...
A significant share of households in low-income urban areas access electricity from shared meters, which may result in suboptimal electricity use. However, this issue has received little attention from academics and policymakers. While electricity meter sharing may reduce the fixed connection costs, it can contribute to reduced energy efficiency, create agency problems between landlords and tenants (due to imperfect information on different households’ electricity consumption), leading to social conflict (mediated by asymmetries in bargaining power and knowledge), and undermining confidence in service provision by the utility. More specifically, three potential problems arise from meter sharing. First, households may pay significantly below or above their actual consumption, triggering...
Developing countries are often faced with a dilemma: governments offer a variety of social protection schemes to people in need, but take-up rates remain quite low. While researchers have studied interventions meant to improve the take-up and targeting of specific welfare schemes, little is known about how individuals navigate the entire system of welfare schemes and decide how many and which ones to apply to. Therefore, I investigate the following research question: How does the quantity of government welfare schemes offered to individuals affect the take-up and targeting of these benefits? I study this question by implementing a randomized controlled trial in which I experimentally vary the quantity of welfare schemes shared with internal migrants in India.
This study addresses the potential impact of an Educational Robotics (ER) workshop on the development of executive functions and socioemotional skills, as well as neurobiological correlates, in children from vulnerable environments. Based on the premise that these skills are crucial for academic and social success, longitudinal research is proposed with 94 fourth-grade children, divided into intervention and control groups. Through pre- and post-intervention evaluations over the course of a school year, we seek not only to examine the immediate effects, but also to better understand their sustainability over time. In addition, the analysis will be complemented with administrative data to obtain a more complete perspective of the results. It is expected that this study will provide solid...
Integration agreements between job seekers and public employment services define mutual obligations for labor market integration, including job search requirements, the support provided by the agency, and the conditions under which compliance is monitored and sanctioned. We study how reminding job seekers of different dimensions of these commitments affects their job search behavior, their knowledge of the rules they are subject to, and their labor market outcomes. The study is conducted in the context of the French Contrat d'Engagement (CE), a mandatory integration agreement signed by job seekers and caseworkers upon registration with the French public employment service, France Travail. The CE includes a personalized action plan specifying activities to support labor market integratio...
Based on theoretical predictions, I conduct a laboratory experiment to explore whether (a) self-image concerns are reference-dependent and (b) loss aversion applies to self-image concerns. I let subjects work on an IQ test, a self-image-relevant task, and induce an exogenous shift in complexity designed to put them at either gain or loss in self-image. Then, I elicit their willingness to acquire feedback. Considering potentially asymmetric belief updating, I analyze whether subjects who experience loss in self-image are more likely to acquire feedback compared to those with a loss in this domain. Update 20.07.2026: Title updated to match the current manuscript. The original preregistered hypotheses and analysis plan remain unchanged.
In the context of the rising costs of healthcare, our study seeks to address a key component of input costs in hospital systems: the costs of supplies used in surgical procedures. Physicians are given substantial autonomy in the way they perform medical procedures including the choice of which supplies to use during treatment. This autonomy is an integral part of the organizational design of most hospitals, as it is thought that decentralization puts decision rights in the hands of the most informed agents. However, doctors are not typically incentivized to reduce costs and thus often select expensive supplies even when less expensive options exist. Our project uses several interventions to encourage doctors to select lower cost, but equal quality, supplies. Our interventions include (1...
Marriage is among the largest financial decisions an Indian family makes. Dowry transfers at a daughter's wedding can consume more than a year of household income, and the quality of her match shapes her economic security, autonomy, and well-being for decades. How wisely families allocate financial resources across daughters therefore matters enormously. Parents typically arrange their children's marriages in birth order. If a good elder match functions as a positive signal to the marriage market, improving how prospective grooms' families view the household, then parents can capitalise on this spillover by strategically allocating more resources to the elder daughter's match. If no such spillover exists, or if parents misjudge it, the same allocation deprives the younger sister of reso...
Estimates suggest that 250 million children under 5-years of age in low- and middle-income countries are at risk of not reaching their developmental potential (Lu, Black, & Richter, 2016). Compared to other regions, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of children at risk, with 38% of the 143 million children younger than 5 stunted and 50% living in extreme poverty (Lu et al., 2016). Early childhood education (ECE) can support child development; estimates suggest that the benefit–cost ratio of increasing ECE access in LMICs is considerable (Engle et al., 2011). Whether ECE targeted to the most vulnerable girls in a community can reduce gender inequalities is not known. Northern Nigeria has some of the world’s highest rates of child marriage and maternal mortality and lowest ra...
I am running an RCT in 80 government and 40 low-cost private schools in Cape Coast Ghana for first grade students. These schools get one or both of two cross-randomized treatments. One treatment organizes scripted parent meetings where parents are 1) told the benefits of doing literacy activities with their child at home (e.g. asking what they learned in school, reading with them, going through school materials etc.), 2) trained on how to understand the report card they get on students literacy scores, and 3) briefly trained how to run a 1-minute reading assessment using provided materials on their child. The other cross-randomized treatment trains school leaders to better coach their teachers in teaching literacy, and also how to interact/engage parents. I am studying the interaction o...