AEA RCT Registry currently lists 3425 studies with locations in 142 countries.
Providing financial incentives to encourage behavioral change is increasingly common: policymakers pay people to exercise, to study more, and maintain tree cover. In designing incentives for behavior change, there is frequently a tradeoff between motivating those with high and low costs of engaging in the behavior: whereas the optimal contract for high-cost individuals will have a large incentive or a low behavior target, the optimal contract for low-cost individuals will have a small incentive or a large behavior target. This project will investigate methods for targeting incentive contracts for behavioral change to individuals with heterogeneous behavior cost. In a randomized controlled trial among individuals with diabetes and prediabetes, we will experimentally evaluate two methods ...
How does an epidemic affect individuals’ expectations on economic prospects? Do people care more about containing the disease or maintaining sustaining normal economic activities during the epidemic? We implement an incentivized longitudinal online survey on economic expectations with randomized controlled trials during the COVID-19 epidemic in China to answer these questions. Conditioning on individual fixed effects, we find that lower number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in a city significantly increases individual’s expectation on GDP growth rate. However, individuals’ perceptions on the level of economic recovery are not correlated with their expectations on GDP growth. Moreover, individuals do not update their expectations when information on work resumption rate is provided in a ran...
Many beneficiaries of social welfare programs around the world receive benefits in cash or by check. Can distributing welfare benefits through electronic transfers directly into bank accounts help low-income individuals enter the formal financial sector? We evaluate how transitioning a social welfare program from cash distribution to electronic transfers impacts recipients’ access to their funds, as well as their savings, debt and subjective well-being.
This project explores the impact of measurement on survey responses. We hypothesize that the very act of measuring survey responses can affect the distribution of those responses. We design and implement an experiment that mimics the famous double slit experiment of Thomas Young (1801) demonstrating wave-particle duality for light depending on whether its passage through double slits is subject to detection of which slit the light particle went through. In our experiment, subjects are asked to respond to a survey question by providing a numerical response on a given scale. In the control treatment, their numerical answer is recorded and reported back to participants. This is analogous to the physics experiment where a detector identifies the slit through which a particle went through. A...
Despite widespread public attention to the opioid epidemic and numerous policies to prevent opioid misuse, overdose deaths in the United States increased 16 percent per annum between 2014 and 2017. Public health authorities consider naloxone, a prescription opioid-overdose reversal drug, a key strategy to stemming the tide of overdose deaths and recommend dispensing the medication along with high-dose opioid prescriptions. Nonetheless, naloxone take-up remains low. In collaboration with an online pharmacy platform licensed to dispense naloxone in many states, we will use an online advertising campaign to pilot test approaches to increasing naloxone purchases. Randomizing advertisements across counties, we will measure how traffic to the pharmacy site and naloxone purchases respond to pu...
A significant challenge to the provision of local public services such as water, sanitation, waste removal, etc. in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries the social compact, whereby citizens agree to pay taxes to fund government services that are then credibly and transparently delivered, is broken. A low willingness to pay taxes leads to low revenue collection and prevents adequate service provision, which in turn reduces willingness to pay and even leads to citizen disengagement from the state. In this project, we investigate whether strengthening the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizens’ willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and ultimately revitali...
In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Italy’s government ordered the closure of all schools and universities in the country. Educators were forced to rapidly adapt to online/ distance learning methods. At home, students from underprivileged backgrounds are less likely to have proper learning support. This inequality might increase existing learning gaps by socioeconomic characteristics. The intent of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention that provides individual online tutoring to students whose background does not allow them to properly follow learning activities during the school closure. Specifically, the intervention will randomly assign middle school students to a tutor -a volunteer college student- who will provide 3 hours of online tutoring per week. W...
Using "La bonne boîte", a French online job search assistance service that aims at helping unemployed job seekers to locate hiring establishments, we investigate the impact of targeted job search recommendations on the job finding rates of job seekers,the job filling rate of establishments and the potential reduction in occupational mismatch at the commuting zone level
In a controlled experiment, we will study how the coronavirus crisis causally affects key components of people's moral perspective, such as inequality acceptance, selfi shness and moral universalism, using a representative sample of Americans.
During this time of pandemic, we seek to understand how citizens view a set of fundamental tradeoffs between civil liberties, economic wellbeing and health. We have devised a novel survey instrument that seeks to capture these trade-offs explicitly. In addition to leveraging quasi-experimental variation from the severity of crisis to identify the relevant trade-offs, we will also experimentally manipulate the salience of health or civil liberties through two information treatments.