AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12635 studies with locations in 171 countries.
To exit poverty, income streams of the poor must align with their liquidity needs (e.g., large investments, consumption-smoothing, saving for shocks, and smaller expenses). Traditional cash transfer programs lack flexibility, offering only fixed payment structures. This project will measure the demand for, and the welfare impacts of, the choice of a fully flexible payment schedule (frequency, timing, and amounts) in partnership with the Government of Ghana's Livelihood Against Poverty (LEAP) Program. First, we will randomize 800 (of 1,500) households into a control group (C) and 700 to a treatment group will receive cash transfers (T). Next, we will elicit beneficiary preferences over preferred times and amounts of cash transfers and measure respondents' willingness to accept (WTA)...
We design and conduct a large-scale randomized controlled survey experiment to investigate how individuals perceive future old-age pension income and how pension information affects expectations, confidence, retirement preparedness, behavioural intentions, and policy preferences. The experiment will be fielded after the first nationwide distribution of individualized pension forecasts by the Slovak social-security administration and targets respondents who are not yet receiving an old-age pension. We collect respondents’ expectations about future pension income, confidence in these expectations, understanding of the pension system, receipt and comprehension of the official forecast, financial literacy, zero-sum beliefs, perceived pension adequacy, and views on pension reform and interge...
In this project, we examine how narratives influence the incorporation of new information into individuals’ beliefs. Specifically, we will replicate a classic Bayesian problem in a controlled experiment, where individuals face uncertainty and use new information to update their beliefs about the true state of the world. To this end, we will randomly assign participants to one of two conditions. In the baseline treatment, participants will engage with an abstract statistical urn problem: participants must identify from which of two urns, with different compositions, the colored balls are drawn. In the narrative treatment, participants will instead receive a fictional story—framed around identifying a culprit—that mirrors the same statistical problem. The only difference from the baseline...
Access to higher education can improve career opportunities and economic mobility, but many young people in developing countries lack reliable information about university admissions, scholarships, and financing options for their studies. This study examines whether providing targeted information can help students make better decisions about higher education in Bangladesh. Using a cluster-randomized controlled trial (cRCT) across 175 BRAC branches in 12 districts of Bangladesh, we evaluate the effects of digital information packages covering university admissions, scholarships, accommodation, and part-time work opportunities. We assess their impact on students’ educational aspirations, university application preparedness, tertiary enrollment, and engagement in income-generating activiti...
This research employs an artefactual framed-field experiment with students at the investigating University to assess how representation affects individuals’ perceptions of their own academic ability as well as their likelihood to pursue higher education. The experiment also investigates participants’ perceptions of the likelihood that their peers will pursue further education, by gender. Participation is open to current University students at the investigating University across all degree levels and academic fields. Participants will view a video depicting a panel of notable academics. Treatments will vary across the panel depicted with regards to the gender diversity of the academics shown. Participants will be asked a series of questions both before and after the video is shown to...
Remote areas in low-income countries have poor access to quality healthcare. One challenge in developing state capacity in remote areas is the difficulty in attracting skilled workers (like doctors or nurses), to which a common solution is to engage less skilled workers (community health workers). A new solution is to bring higher-skilled professionals to rural areas through digital technology. Telehealth, which connects patients to qualified healthcare professionals via phone, provides a new opportunity for governments to reach remote areas with high-quality healthcare services at relatively low cost. Although the popularity of telehealth has dramatically increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is to date no causal evidence of its impacts in low-income countries. ...
This paper experimentally tests multiple multi-attribute choice models such as a range normalization model and a pairwise normalization model in a consumer context. The experimental design generates choice sets that can distinguish the models as each model predicts a distinct set of demand types. Specifically, we do comparative statics by investigating how choice probabilities of alternatives vary between choice sets. Moreover, we do a cross-validation exercise by constructing a maximum likelihood in the spirit of Harless and Camerer (1994).
A necessary condition for reducing inequality is the social condemnation of it. In fact, policies that aim to reduce inequality can only be effectively implemented if it is considered unacceptable by citizens. Thus, the central question of this research project is: Does fiction reading causally increase prosociality? The hypothesis we work with is that art, in general, and fiction reading in particular, can be one of the tools that helps us change social norms to make inequality less socially acceptable. We randomize participants into two courses: a fiction reading course and an behavioral economics for beginners course with the same intensity. Both courses last for 4 (pilot) to 6 (experiment) weeks. After the courses we use economic games to elicit participants preferences and measu...
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that laws and institutions shape social norms — not only through enforcement but through their signalling function: communicating what is socially acceptable and legitimising or delegitimising group identities in the public sphere. This signalling effect is theorised to be especially powerful when institutional signals are reinforced by religious authority, yet causal evidence from low-institutional-legitimacy, high-religious-salience contexts remains scarce. In contexts such as Pakistan, where the credibility of secular state institutions is constrained and Islamic authority operates as the primary mechanism of norm legitimation, understanding how religious framing modulates the effect of institutional signals on public behaviour is both theoreti...
This study investigates how individuals perceive and respond to financial risk under uncertainty, using an incentivized 24-month simulated personal loan repayment task. Participants recruited via Prolific are randomly assigned to one of four conditions in a 2×2 between-subjects factorial design, crossing (a) outcome framing (the same financial information presented as gains vs. as losses) and (b) visibility of a running performance score (displayed vs. hidden) throughout the task. Each simulated month, participants decide how much to repay toward a fixed loan installment while managing income, expenses, and a sequence of life events common to all conditions. Behavioral outcomes — repayment amount, overdraft usage, and a composite monthly performance score — are recorded automatically ea...