AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12695 studies with locations in 171 countries.
This study tests whether providing local government officials with better information and non-financial recognition can improve the allocation of public drinking water wells in rural Bangladesh. Naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater affects tens of millions of people in Bangladesh and poses major health and economic risks. Each year, the government installs a limited number of deep wells to provide arsenic-safe water, but these wells are not always placed where they would benefit the most people. In this randomized controlled trial, 200 Union Chairpersons, who dictate the allocation of governmental wells within their jurisdiction, are cross-randomized into either receiving an access to a web-based planning tool and/or receiving an incentive to prioritize high-arsenic regions wit...
Experimental research in Bangladesh by Lee et al. (2018), now published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (AEJ: Applied), showed promising positive impacts of the introduction of mobile money to urban migrants and their households at origin. In this project, we propose to expand the scope of the study to test the external validity of the results from Lee et al. (2018) in the subcontinent in two ways; first, through the use of a larger sample of migrant-household pairs in Bangladesh, and second, by including sites in Pakistan and India. This study will make use of a randomized control trial (RCT) design in each country, to study the impact of a deliberately-designed program in each country, and not a simple replication of the original experiment. Comparing the outcomes ...
The study investigates a causal relationship between the Alphabetisation Policy Improvement Program - a specific set of results-oriented school management practices, such as teachers’ continued training - and student literacy in the initial grades of state-run schools in Rondônia state, northern Brazil. The program is led by the Court of Accountability of Rondônia (TCE-RO) and twenty-two Municipal Secretariat of Education from twenty-two municipalities of the Rondônia state. One hundred and fifty schools were selected from these 22 municipalities to participate in the program. Schools within each city were randomly assigned to the treatment and control groups. The implementation should last two years. At the end of the program, a cross-section analysis will be conducted to assess possib...
Educational attainment is a key determinant of health and economic outcomes. The period of late adolescence is a critical period of development when changes in educational processes can have dramatic consequences over the life course. However, despite major progress made in primary education, only around 40% of adolescents reach the last grade of lower secondary school in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) today. Average educational attainment remains lowest among women in SSA, particularly in central and western SSA. The primary objective of this project is to identify the most effective strategies to reduce these disparities and to improve secondary school attendance. Building on the key insights and recommendations of the 2020 Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel, we will conduct a pilo...
Despite significant gains in financial access across Low- and Middle-Income Countries, financial health and resilience remain critically low among informal sector workers, largely due to exposure to uninsured health shocks. In Nigeria, only about 3% of adults aged 15-49 have any form of health insurance, leaving the majority vulnerable to catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures that affects business viability and loan repayment. This study provides causal evidence on the impact of bundling health insurance with microfinance loans on the financial outcomes of informal micro and small business owners in Edo State, Nigeria. In partnership with a microfinance institution and the Edo State Health Insurance Commission, eligible interested clients are offered a voluntary bundled product combin...
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...
In this online field experiment, we study whether peer-to-peer referrals increase take-up of a talent recognition program: the Academic Excellence Awards at a private university in Colombia. Students are eligible to participate if their GPA is at least 4.0 on a 5-point grading scale. The award selection process consists of three online steps designed to assess a broader set of skills than academic performance alone. In a first phase, all eligible students are invited to complete a short survey for high-achieving students. At the end of the survey, respondents can nominate up to four peers whom they believe should be invited to participate in the award selection process. Students who submit at least one referral are the “seeds” in our referral experiment. In a second phase, eligible nomi...
Women-owned/led small- and medium-sized enterprises (WSMEs) are estimated to earn less than one percent of procurement spend by large corporations and governments worldwide. There is a lack of rigorous quantitative evidence on interventions designed to support WSMEs’ participation in procurement. This study uses an RCT to estimate the impact of capacity-building solutions for WSMEs --- comprising online and in-person trainings, and related activities --- on their procurement-readiness.
The Japanese government suspended the Go To Travel campaign that it had launched in 2020 because of the spread of COVID-19. However, the number of new cases of infection nationwide continues to decrease in Japan. In this study, we examine the effects of the Go To Travel campaign on the Oita-prefecture tourist decision making. Oita-prefecture is a famous tourist spot in Japan. To investigate this, we will conduct an online survey experiment on tourist decision making, under certain conditions including the nudge-based text, lack of COVID-19 vaccination certificate, reduced business hours of bars, and declaration of a state of emergency. Based on the theoretical framework in Allcott and Kessler (2019, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics), we estimate the social welfare effect i...
This study examines how the presentation of delivery-time predictions affects user behavior and satisfaction on a large digital logistics platform. Online platforms often provide estimated delivery times, but these predictions are inherently uncertain. Platforms must decide how precisely to present this information—for example, as a specific time, a broader time window, or with additional shipment checkpoint updates. In collaboration with a large logistics information platform, we conduct a randomized controlled field experiment in which users are randomly assigned to different versions of the shipment-tracking interface. The experiment varies three main dimensions: the type of prediction model used, whether intermediate shipment nodes are displayed, and the precision of the predicted d...