AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12495 studies with locations in 171 countries.
This is the AEA Registry for the General Equilibrium Effects of Universal Cash Transfer program in Malawi. It is a three-stage cluster-randomized controlled trial of the NGO GiveDirectly's unconditional cash transfer program at scale. The transfers are universal (every adult in a village is eligible), unconditional, one-time, and lump-sum, amounting to approximately 550 USD or 70-100% of baseline annual consumption expenditure of recipients. Randomization is at the village, Group-Village-Headman (GVH), and Traditional Authority (TA) level, creating exogenous variation in transfer receipt, and geographic variation in the extent of transfers going into local economies. Together with original panel data collected on households, enterprises, local leaders, markets, and prices, and administr...
Fertility has fallen to historically low levels across high-income countries, with first-order consequences for population aging, labor supply, and the financing of social-insurance systems. The household trade-offs behind this decline -- how the money and time costs of children shape family-size choices -- are difficult to identify from observational data, because those costs are not exogenous and are entangled with the preferences and circumstances that drive fertility. This study uses a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to recover US women's trade-offs between additional children, household income, and the allocation of time, independently of one another. Each of 2,000 women aged 23-35 completes ten hypothetical choice tasks comparing two descriptions of her life ten years hence; the ...
Incarcerated populations have skyrocketed in most parts of the world over the past decades. How does incarceration affect people’s lives? Identifying the causal effects of incarceration has proven challenging because of the many unobservable external factors (such as pre-existing differences in personality and criminal attitudes) that threaten the validity of a comparison between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people. We study the psychological, social, economic, and health consequences of short-term incarceration using a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We build on the US cash bail system, which in theory provides a financial incentive for court appearance but in practice may impose a high burden for subjects with lower socio-economic status. The study offers recently arrested p...
We study how bundling together policy recommendations on different policy issues affects voters' policy views. Voters are randomized into (i) treatment messages, each consisting of policy recommendations on two policy issues, and (ii) control messages, where policy recommendations are sent separately. The issues bundled differ in ideological value, policy domain, and complexity. We investigate the presence of belief spillovers across policy domains, and the role played by trust and identity in explaining these spillovers.
A rural-urban digital divide persists in the United States, despite significant efforts and successes in closing the gap, exacerbating uneven access to education, employment, healthcare, and innovation. As artificial intelligence (AI) has become a larger factor in our daily lives, this digital divide has spilled over into a rural-urban AI-divide, with urban adults of working age using AI at twice the rate of their rural counterparts. But the AI-divide may not be fully explained by differential access. This work uses an experimental design with random assignment to identify motivational aspects of the rural-urban AI-divide. In the study, participants engage in two rounds of an online task. In the first round, participants learn how to use a Caesar cipher to encode a word. In the second r...
A significant share of households in low-income urban areas access electricity from shared meters, which may result in suboptimal electricity use. However, this issue has received little attention from academics and policymakers. While electricity meter sharing may reduce the fixed connection costs, it can contribute to reduced energy efficiency, create agency problems between landlords and tenants (due to imperfect information on different households’ electricity consumption), leading to social conflict (mediated by asymmetries in bargaining power and knowledge), and undermining confidence in service provision by the utility. More specifically, three potential problems arise from meter sharing. First, households may pay significantly below or above their actual consumption, triggering...
The regular provision of unconditional cash transfers to individuals is a tactic to fight poverty that has attracted significant interest from researchers and policymakers. Despite this interest, many fundamental questions about the effects of receiving sustained unconditional cash transfers remain. In this randomized controlled trial, 1,000 individuals will receive $1,000 per month for 3 years. A control group of 2,000 individuals who receive $50 per month will serve as the comparison group. The study offers an opportunity to inform both the debate over unconditional cash assistance and other questions about the effects of income that typically elude causal identification.
This pilot survey experiment seeks to replicate and extend Conklin (2020) by examining whether calling a complainant a “victim,” rather than a “complaining witness,” affects how people evaluate an alleged assault case. Participants will read a brief vignette in which a defendant denies that an assault occurred and claims that the complainant fabricated the accusation. The experiment randomly varies the term used to refer to the complainant (“victim” versus “complaining witness”) and the complainant’s gender in the vignette. After reading the vignette, participants will answer questions about whether they believe the defendant punched the complainant, whether they agree that the complainant is a victim, and other questions about the two parties and their claims. The study is intended to ...
Youth unemployment in Andalucia is among the highest in Europe. By contrast, on the firms' side, there is an unmet demand for workers with tech skills. AprenTIC tests whether intensive, occupation-specific digital skills training can improve the employment prospects and well-being of unemployed young people.
This study evaluates the impact of the World Health Organization’s Early Adolescent Skills for Emotions (EASE) intervention among 10-15-year-old adolescents in poverty contexts in Ethiopia. The intervention will be implemented within Compassion International’s child development program with treatment randomized at the site level. 25 adolescents at each of the 70 sites have been identified by program staff as having the target selection criteria of heightened internalizing challenges resulting in a total of 1,750 study participants. Half of the sites will be randomly assigned to receive the EASE intervention, and the other half will serve as control sites. As a result, approximately 875 adolescents will participate in the EASE intervention during the study period. The study includes ...