AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1945 studies with locations in 120 countries.
The New York City public school system is the largest in the United States, with over 1,200 schools and more than 1.1 million students enrolled each year. For more than a decade, it has also been the site of an unprecedented investment in high school reform. Beginning in 2002 and with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) closed many large, comprehensive high schools with a history of low performance and created hundreds of new small secondary schools. At the same time, the NYCDOE instituted a centralized high school admissions process for matching incoming ninth-grade students to the over 400 high school options available to them. The small-school movement has been a national one. And while nea...
The importance of early life has been highlighted in three series on Early Childhood Development (ECD) published in The Lancet between 2007 and 2016 and in many other publications. One of the key conclusions of this burgeoning literature is that stimulation interventions can be life-changing with long-run persistent effects leading to tangible improvements in quality of life through adulthood. There have been an increasing number of studies, including randomized trials, of interventions (typically based at home) during the first life-cycle stage, from pregnancy to 2 years or interventions (often center-based) during the second life-cycle stage (3 to 5). Ultimately, the aim of such interventions is to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty and to offer equal opportunity to...
This research investigates whether the effective use of mathematics textbooks structured to increase academic learning time improves learning outcome of students of primary and lower secondary education in El Salvador or not. This study targets for the 2nd and the 7th grades students in El Salvador. Cognitive skills of knowing, application and reasoning on all the domains of mathematics are measured by paper test. The students' attitude for learning of mathematics are measured by questionnaire. This study also evaluates whether mentoring and review of teaching practice enhance the behavioral change of teachers on the effective use of the textbooks. The heterogeneity of impact on learning outcome by intervention on students with lower academic performance at the baseline, and with fewer ...
Motivated by the observation that infringing use of content reveals demand and that infringement may result from frictions preventing legal consumption, we contact infringers of expensive digital images and direct them toward a cheaper product. Two interventions are designed to reduce search costs for (i) price and (ii) product information.
This study explores whether advice and leadership is more effective when by provided by men versus women. We additionally explore whether the language used in the provision of advice, and whether the outcome is based on group versus individual choices, changes how subjects respond to male and female leadership. We additionally estimate whether our treatment effects differ from subjects' and experts' priors.
We experimentally examine the role of private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a public goods game in which the Marginal Per Capita Return (MPCR) is either high or low. Before contributing, three players observe private signals correlated with the true MPCR and then send cheap talk messages to one another. There are social gains from truthful communication, but a private incentive to exaggerate. We compare treatments with and without cheap talk, finding that messages are largely truthful and influence contribution decisions. In further treatments, we increase the incentive to exaggerate and find reduced truthfulness and smaller gains from communication.
This proposed project studies technology upgrading in an export supply chain of the dragon fruit industry of Vietnam. Despite demand for high-quality fruits from overseas markets, the supply of dragon fruits that meet export standards is surprisingly low. Observations on agricultural practices show persistent use of low technology along the supply chain. I hypothesize that a key reason for the lack of supply of export-quality dragon fruits is that farmers and intermediaries lack the information and technological resources that are necessary to produce and trade high-quality agricultural products. I plan to test this hypothesis through a randomized control trial that generates exogenous variation in access to information and training on an export-oriented agricultural technology for drag...
This project seeks to understand how individuals respond to financial incentive programs for wellness care. In a randomized controlled trial among customers with HEDIS care gaps, we will experimentally compare the impacts of incentives for gap closure (gift cards), information on existing gaps (mailers), and no intervention. The research objectives are to assess how responsive individuals are to incentives for, and to information about, existing care gaps; and to assess spillovers from incentives onto other care. In addition, impacts on downstream utilization will be studied, which may be impacted if financial incentives are effective at increasing wellness visits.
An implication of loss aversion is that contracts written to reward agents with gains from effort will not produce the same effort as contracts that are otherwise equivalent but exact losses from the lack of effort. Given that a “losses contract” increases average effort, those who are loss averse should drive this increase. We run a laboratory experiment in which subjects are incentivized to complete a real-effort task. Subjects are treated with either a "gains" or "losses" frame. Using an independent measure of loss aversion, we focus on how loss averse subjects are differentially affected by this framing.
Using a randomized controlled experiment involving economists in nineteen countries, we estimate the effect of ideological bias on views among economists. Participants were asked to evaluate statements from prominent economists on a wide range of topics. However, source attribution for each statement was randomized without participants’ knowledge. For each statement, participants either received the actual source, an altered ideologically-different source, or no source. We then measure whether economists agree/disagree with identical statements to different degrees when statements are attributed to authors (researchers) with different views (ideologies) which put them at different distances to mainstream economics. Traditional norms of modern science, such as organized skepticism and di...