AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12024 studies with locations in 170 countries.
Teaching children reading and English as a second language (ESL) skills---skills that provide lifelong returns---requires access to engaging, contextually relevant materials. For children outside of Western contexts, English-language story options often lack familiar settings, norms, problems, and characters. We aim to learn whether stories written with generative AI assistance can fill that gap by creating context-relevant stories that better engage children in India.
How social ties are formed, maintained, and mobilized has changed with the adoption of digital communication technologies like WhatsApp. This paper estimates the value of communication infrastructure that sustains social networks and examines the short-run causal effects of losing partial access to it on social capital and subjective well-being. We conduct a field experiment in three remote island communities in Indonesia, recruiting approximately 1,200 household heads as participants. To elicit individuals’ willingness to accept a partial daily restriction on WhatsApp usage, we implement the double-bounded dichotomous choice (DBDC) method. Participants are then randomly assigned to a treatment group, in which WhatsApp access is restricted for 4 hours per day over 6 days, or to a contro...
This study evaluates the demand for commitment in education by measuring caregivers’ willingness to trade off school-fee subsidies against unconditional cash transfers. We implement a randomized controlled trial with 2,000 pupils across 30 government primary schools in Jinja District, Uganda. Caregivers first complete an incentive-compatible multiple price list eliciting their preferences between a direct subsidy and varying amounts of cash. Pupils are then randomly assigned to one of three treatment arms or a control group: (i) a direct subsidy covering Term 1 dues, (ii) an unconditional cash transfer at the start of Term 1, or (iii) an unconditional cash transfer delivered immediately at the time of the survey. The design allows us to quantify the demand for subsidies as a commitment ...
The increasing share of renewable energy has led to more periods with abundant electricity supply and low wholesale prices. However, most households are on fixed-price energy-supply contracts and therefore do not adjust their electricity use in response to these conditions. This study evaluates an electricity pricing program in which households receive temporary price discounts during hours with negative day-ahead wholesale market prices. The program is implemented as a randomized controlled trial, allowing us to study how households respond to dynamic price incentives. Using high-frequency smart meter data, we examine whether households shift their electricity use toward discounted hours and how total electricity consumption changes. We also explore how responses differ across house...
This study investigates whether deterrence messages and social norm messages are complementary or substitutes in generating voluntary tax compliance among firms. Phase 1 employs a 2×2 factorial experimental design involving firms that failed to file their 2024 Industry and Commerce Tax (ICA) declarations in Medellín, Colombia. Using stratified randomization by firm size, sector, and location, firms are assigned to four groups receiving: (1) a neutral reminder (control), (2) deterrence-only message highlighting penalties and enforcement, (3) social norm-only message emphasizing peer compliance rates, or (4) a combined deterrence and social norm message. The primary research question tests whether these mechanisms exhibit complementarity (combined effect exceeds sum of individual effects)...
This study examines whether moral wiggle room—operationalized as selective information avoidance under moral ambiguity that can license self-serving behavior—can arise in the absence of psychological self-image maintenance. A large language model (LLM) is used to generate decision outputs in a canonical moral wiggle room game in which payoff information may be costlessly revealed or avoided prior to an allocation decision. The model is prompted under predefined reasoning frames that impose distinct evaluative criteria. A complementary human-subjects study elicits normative evaluations of potential choices made in the moral wiggle room game. Holding realized outcomes constant, the study examines how information availability affects judgments of social appropriateness, responsibility, and...
Legal or administrative barriers—such as employment bans for asylum seekers—can prevent people from working even when they initially would like to. This study examines whether such temporary barriers reduce people’s willingness to work even after the barriers are removed and explores possible mechanisms driving this effect. In a multi-day online experiment, participants repeatedly choose between a well-paid work option and a lower-paid leisure option. In one treatment, participants are repeatedly prevented from carrying out the work option they choose and are instead assigned to leisure, creating a situation in which access to work is externally restricted. In a control group, participants always have full access to the work option. The central hypothesis is that being repeatedly ...
Update 4.11.2024: Mention of the US elections added. Update 30.4.2026: Abstract updated to include a mention of the extension survey and language is edited. This paper examines individuals’ redistributive preferences and the motivations underlying them. While the effects of information on perceptions of inequality are well established, less is known about how such perceptions translate into preferences for redistributive policies. In addition, relatively little is known about the extent to which policymakers’ preferences align with those of citizens, and whether policymakers accurately perceive citizens’ preferences, particularly when policy choices involve trade-offs. To address these questions, we implement two surveys. The first, conducted in November 2024, focuses on redistribut...
We conducted a randomized field experiment in which an entrepreneur reached out to high-skilled prospective employees regarding a job opening. The gender of the co-founders was randomly altered. We aim to test whether high-skill employees exhibit a differential response rate to a meeting request from a female entrepreneur. Our pilot, which ran in March 2024, indicates that high-skill employees are 50% less likely to respond to a female entrepreneur. To identify the mechanism, we primed a subset of applicants with a newsletter from an unrelated non-profit organization, sent a few days before the entrepreneur’s outreach. The newsletter provided information on large initiatives aimed at supporting female entrepreneurs with venture capital funding. In the pilot, this intervention completely...
This study evaluates an intervention designed to examine whether activities that simulate the use of artificial intelligence (AI)–supported instructional responses can influence literacy teachers’ knowledge, confidence, perceived usefulness, and self-reported skills related to literacy instruction. The intervention is implemented with early grade literacy teachers from four Brazilian municipalities, João Pessoa (PB), Caxias do Sul (RS), Salvador (BA), and Vitória (ES), in partnership with local education authorities. Participants are randomly assigned to receive the intervention either before or after completing a questionnaire, enabling comparisons between teachers exposed to the simulated AI-based activities and those who have not yet participated at the time of assessment. The interv...