AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12869 studies with locations in 172 countries.
Schools can play a critical role in shaping norms around violence, inclusion, and gender equality, particularly in contexts affected by insecurity and social tensions. In northern Benin, rising concerns related to violent extremism pose challenges to social cohesion, student well-being, and learning environments. Can teacher training that promotes non-violent, inclusive pedagogy improve classroom practices and reduce violence in schools? And do such changes translate into improved educational and socio-emotional outcomes for students? This study addresses these questions through a randomized controlled trial evaluating a school-based intervention implemented in 100 primary schools in the Donga department of Benin. Led by “Foundation Graines de Paix”, the program trains primary school te...
In this study we add to the long tradition of assets market experiments going back to the seminal work of Plott and Sunder in the late 80’s and early 90’ by closely looking at the interaction between costly information acquisition and trading purpose. We conduct a laboratory assets market experiment wit an Overlapping Generations framework where there are speculating investors (who do not collect dividends and trade only for capital gains since they won't be "alive" when dividends realize) and dividend-collecting investors (who will be "alive" when state-contingent dividends are paid).
This pre-analysis plan describes a randomized controlled trial evaluating an AI-powered mental health chatbot among undergraduate students in India’s public universities. Using baseline data from 4,489 students across seven colleges in Delhi, we document a high prevalence of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, and low rates of mental health care-seeking. Classrooms are randomized to a control group or to receive four weeks of access to the chatbot. Within treated classrooms, students are cross-randomized to alumni endorsements and habit-formation streaks. The plan pre-specifies intent-to-treat estimates of the effects of chatbot access and the additional interventions on adoption and engagement, care-seeking behavior, stigma (both own and perceived), willingness to pay for therapy, and...
When actions generate externalities, market prices alone fail to reflect their full social costs or benefits, leading to inefficient outcomes. The classical remedy is a Pigouvian tax, which restores the first-best on its own. Yet such price instruments rarely operate alone: informal social norms governed by punishment are also widespread and discipline the same behaviors. If a tax suffices in theory, why do people punish those engaging in externality-inducing actions? We answer this question using an incentivized experiment uncovering the psychology of punishment. Our experiment tests whether individuals’ willingness to punish others engaging in externality-inducing actions depends on two theoretically important inputs: the extent to which externalities are internalized by policy and th...
We study whether the Complex Instruction Program (CIP) improves the achievement of disadvantaged students and lowers their risk of dropping out. CIP restructures classroom group work to break entrenched status hierarchies and raise the standing of low-status students, on the premise that dropout is as much rooted in how students are positioned in the classroom as in what they are taught. We test this in a school-level cluster-randomized trial across 84 Hungarian primary schools serving disadvantaged populations, using a staggered treatment assignment design: treatment teachers are trained and mentored over a school year and deliver CIP lessons to students in grades 5–8, while control schools adopt the program two years later. Our primary outcomes are standardized mathematics and reading...
This study examines how information about a peer's investment outcomes affects individual investment decisions among Indian business students in a portfolio allocation setting. Participants are randomly assigned to one of four conditions that vary the information they receive about a peer's prior investment performance and the context surrounding that performance. We study whether learning about a peer's high investment outcome shifts a participant's own willingness to take on financial risk, and whether this response depends on what the favorable outcome is attributed to. We also examine whether a brief reflective exercise about one's own investment goals before decision-making moderates any such effect. Incentivised measures of risk aversion and loss aversion are collected to explore ...
Traditional fired clay bricks dominate the construction sector in Bangladesh, contributing significantly to air pollution and topsoil degradation. Although cleaner, non-fired alternatives like concrete blocks exist, their adoption remains low. This study evaluates whether reducing information frictions and capacity constraints can accelerate adoption of blocks. We implement a three-arm cluster randomized controlled trial across 66 upazilas (sub-districts) in 22 districts (total baseline sample N = 3,056 respondents). Upazilas are randomized within district into: (i) Control (no intervention), (ii) Treatment 1 (T1): information workshop on block usage plus a block supplier directory targeted to contractors, procurement officers, and private clients, and (iii) Treatment 2 (T2): T1 plus ha...
This study explore the impact of AI agents on online communication. We vary the presence of these entities and examine its effects on online interactions.
In this paper, we provide experimental evidence on the effect of improving childcare quality on prices and profits of childcare providers, as well as the effects on families and children. Specifically, we partner with a social enterprise that provides training and mentorship to daycare providers. We randomize the entry of this enterprise into 30 low-income, urban communities of Kenya, leaving 30 communities as comparison. We then analyze the effect of their entry with detailed surveys of approximately 2000 providers. The main outcome measures are the price, quality, profits, and availability of childcare 6 months, and 12 months, and 24 months after entry. We pair that data with 2,100 surveys of families with small children in the same communities to examine the effect of improving child...
Almost 1 billion adults worldwide are unable read or write in any language, with an estimated cost of US$ 5 billion annually to low-income countries (UNESCO 2020). This is of particular concern in West Africa, which has some of the lowest education indicators in the world. In Niger, the subject of our study, adult illiteracy rates are estimated at 70% (USAID 2023). Illiteracy is particularly striking in rural areas and among women. Niger’s ranking in terms of educational attainment is comparable to other Sahelian countries, namely Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali (UNDP 2017). While policymakers and academics alike have focused on primary and secondary education programs, such programs will only have impacts in the medium to long-term. Adult education programs have the potential to brid...