AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1723 studies with locations in 117 countries.
Latin America has high rates of drug and alcohol consumption by young people (Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission, 2015), with rates rapidly increasing during the adolescent years. In Mexico, the 2014 National Survey of Drug Use among Students (n=191,880; Villatoro et al, 2015) revealed that the prevalence of drug use increases exponentially from primary (3.3%) to middle (10.9%) and high school (26.2%). The same pattern is observed for alcohol binging (defined as 5 or more drinks in one sitting) in the last year: prevalence was 2.4% in primary, 8.9% in middle and 27.3% in high school. The social costs of addictions continue into adulthood. For example, according to the Addiction Attention and Prevention Institute (2012), four out of every five crimes in Mexico are committed und...
We investigate the effect of increased user trust on job outcomes by leveraging a randomized control trial on an online two-sided marketplace.
We provide well-identified evidence on how a large cash windfall from direct cash transfers from an NGO affects political processes and their outcomes for the poorest in rural communities in Kenya. We exploit village-level variation in the rollout of an unconditional cash transfer programme from two village-level randomized controlled trials, covering 1,097 villages. In each trial, we randomly assign half of the villages in an area targeted by the NGO GiveDirectly to an unconditional cash transfer programme, after stratifying by village economic status and size. We examine effects on poorer households which would have been eligible to be recipients of the cash transfer programme, richer households who would not have received the programme, non-recipients, and village-level outcomes. We ...
A randomized experiment with almost 35 million Pandora listeners enables us to measure the sensitivity of consumers to advertising, an important topic of study in the era of ad-supported digital content provision. The experiment randomized listeners into nine treatment groups, each of which received a different level of audio advertising interrupting their music listening, with the highest treatment group receiving more than twice as many ads as the lowest treatment group. By keeping consistent treatment assignment for 21 months, we are able to measure long-run demand effects and compare them to the short-run effects we might obtain with only a month-long experiment. We estimate a demand curve: number of hours listened as a function of the number of ads per hour received. We also mea...
In a randomized experiment in an introductory microeconomics course at the University of Duisburg-Essen, we will test how incorporating goal setting into the technology-assisted tutoring website affects engagement and course outcomes.
Governments must pay their employees for states to function. Frequent delays and leakage of salary payments can undermine government effectiveness. These problems are severe in Afghanistan. Mobile Salary Payments (MSPs) - a system enabling employees to receive their salaries directly via mobile money -present a potential solution. At scale, MSPs can also grow the mobile money ecosystem and promote financial inclusion. We propose a randomized control evaluation of MSPs with the Ministry of Education for a sample of approximately 200,000 teachers. We also propose to evaluate an additional Call Detail Record (CDR)-based attendance monitoring system that will complement the MSPs.
In a situation where individuals are uncertain about whether their level of earnings is due to chance or their own performance, are they more likely to attribute higher earnings levels to performance and lower earnings levels to chance? If so, does this “self-serving bias” decrease the amount of money individuals are willing to redistribute to others who earned less? Using an experimental game setting, I examine differences in redistributive behaviour among individuals based on their earnings determinant (performance, chance, or uncertain). I will first examine whether people have different rates and levels of redistribution depending on their earnings determinant. I will then examine whether earnings level affects perceived earnings determinant. Finally, I will examine differences ...
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...
Americans are increasingly exposed to news and information that confirms instead of challenges their pre-existing viewpoints. Why do we tend to demand ideologically aligned news? Theory and laboratory evidence suggest two broad groups of mechanisms that may play a key role. The first is psychological mechanisms leading to a “taste for consistency," which entails that partisans will be seek ideologically aligned sources even if this means choosing sources which they know to be less accurate. The second mechanism is rational updating that leads partisans to infer that sources which agree with their prior beliefs are likely to be more accurate. Distinguishing the relative importance of these two mechanisms is crucial for understanding how media consumption will evolve and what changes in p...
We study the impact of cash transfers and a psychological video intervention, individually and in combination, on women’s empowerment and intimate partner violence. The sample includes over 3000 married women from around 170 villages in the Siaya Country in Western Kenya. In addition to evaluating the impact of the interventions, we also consider possible mechanisms for the impact.