AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11945 studies with locations in 170 countries.
This randomized controlled trial (RCT) evaluates the causal impact of an AI-powered Research Development Tool on the academic productivity and well-being of early-career researchers. Participants — PhD students and junior economists within five years of their doctorate — will be randomly assigned, within career-stage strata, to either a control group with access to a general-purpose AI or a treatment group with access to a comprehensive AI-driven Research Development Suite offering structured, expert-level feedback on research papers. The control group will receive access 12 months after the experiment's start date. Over a 24-month intervention period, we measure changes in externally evaluated research quality, paper submission rates, job satisfaction, and work-life balance. Our cen...
Investments in early childhood development (ECD) have lifelong effects on the growth of an individual, the educational attainment of the next generation, and the economic growth of a country. Poor ECD trends persist in populations around the world, especially those in lower and middle-income countries. Research shows that many children from less-resourced settings might not be experiencing high quality language and parent-child interaction environments necessary for healthy child development. Evidence from non-Western, as well as low-income settings in developed countries, suggests that the home language and parent-child interaction environment have a strong influence on child development outcomes. Rural China is one example of a low-income setting where the home language environment...
This project will explore whether seasonal forecasts enable pastoralists to cope with long dry seasons in Turkana, Northern Kenya. This is a timely concern as the long dry season in East Africa is projected to become longer in a warming climate. (Wainwright et al., 2021) We will achieve this using an experimental evaluation of a feasibly scalable intervention co-created with local stakeholders and policymakers. Our project will test whether information reached households, whether it changed beliefs and desired actions, and finally whether it improved livelihoods and reduced losses and conflict.
See analysis plan.
Using new cross-country survey and experimental data, we investigate the nature of beliefs about wage inequality and the effect of these beliefs on people’s support for redistribution with over 9000 respondents across six high-income countries (Australia, France, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States). This study combines a flexible elicitation of beliefs about the distribution of full-time wages within each country and a randomized survey experiment where respondents are allocated into one of three groups, two of which receive different types of information about wage inequality.
A large share of the workforce works in self-employed in developing countries, a hard to tax segment, compared to salaried employees. We study the perception of fairness of the tax system, focusing on the horizontal inequity between salaried and self-employed individuals, in five large low and middle-income countries. We conjecture that the prevalence of self-employment, strengthens horizontal equity concerns, which in turn lowers demand for tax interventions, and especially direct income taxation. To test this hypothesis, we conduct online surveys eliciting individual perception on horizontal equity, tax fairness, relation to vertical equity and how these preferences relate to the tax instruments used by their governments. To test whether increased awareness of horizontal inequity affe...
Individuals invest in human capital under uncertainty about their future labor market outcomes. Vocational training prepares students for a specific career path, but the distribution of potential occupations is generally wide, and many may lack information about dispersion of these outcomes and their own proficiency in transferable skills—leading to underinvestment in portable human capital. We test whether providing concise, data-driven information can correct these misperceptions and shift investment toward transferable skills. In partnership with SENAI-SP, Brazil's largest vocational training provider, we conduct a 2×2 factorial experiment among approximately 34,000 students across roughly 100 schools, 1,200 classrooms, and 47 vocational tracks in São Paulo. Classrooms are randomized...
This study examines how individuals adjust their financial behaviour when faced with a sudden liquidity shock combined with changes in tax enforcement. In a laboratory experiment, participants repeatedly allocate income between a formal, taxed deposit account and an informal, untaxed cash holding. In each round, participants must finance a mandatory expenditure by allocating payments between deposits and cash. Expenditure from cash is subject to a friction cost, capturing the relative difficulty of using cash compared to digital payment methods. The experimental design compares behaviour across three treatments: a baseline with no shock, an unanticipated shock, and a pre-announced shock. In both unanticipated shock and preannounced shock treatments, a policy intervention invalidates ac...
This study uses an online experiment to examine how consumers respond to different types of cash rebates linked to environmentally relevant consumption choices. Participants make repeated decisions about how many units of a product to purchase under a fixed price that reflects a carbon charge, with lower consumption associated with greater environmental benefits. We compare behavior under several treatments inlcuding a no rebate control, a guaranteed cash rebate, and several probabilistic rebate schemes that differ in the likelihood of rebate payment. The study is designed to assess whether probabilistic rebates generate similar behavioral responses to guaranteed rebates, and to examine whether responses vary systematically with the probability of receiving a rebate. This experiment con...
We design an experiment to document the validity of rational inattention models. Our design evaluates these models in direct (choosing intended posteriors) and natural (choosing information structures) frames. The former frame implements a decision variable closest to the model’s primitives, while the latter is more natural for experimental settings. By observing the acquired information in either frame, we can determine which class of rational inattention models aligns with the decision-making processes in the lab. These frames provide insights into the validity of these classes in rational inattention models, which are often tested solely based on choice data without observing the chosen level of informativeness. Assessing the consistency of their behavior between the two frames allow...