AEA RCT Registry currently lists 9043 studies with locations in 169 countries.
This study will estimate the direct, causal impact of medical debt on health care utilization, mental health, and wellbeing of patients. To do so, the investigators will administer a survey to approximately 17,000 subjects of a recent medical financial intervention. In that intervention, a non-profit charity, RIP Medical Debt, purchased and abolished medical debt for a randomly selected about 6,000 (out of the 17,000) study subjects. In this current protocol, the investigators will compare surveyed outcomes of subjects who received and did not receive the medical debt abolishment intervention. Because debt abolishment was randomized, comparing surveyed outcomes of treated and control subjects in the cross-section will allow the study to estimate the causal impact of the medical debt abo...
Medical debt is potentially a large burden for many Americans -- with 44 million individuals holding an aggregate $75 billion in medical debt. While these nominal amounts are staggering, it is unclear to what extent medical debt harms financial well-being. Medical debt recovery rates are low, suggesting that the pure “balance sheet” cost of medical debt is modest for most individuals. Yet medical debt may harm individuals through lower credit scores, higher interest rates, and reduced access to credit -- impairing economic opportunities and perhaps even locking individuals in “debt traps.” Collaborating with RIP Medical Debt, a non-profit that buys and abolishes medical debt, we will implement a randomized-control trial (RCT) to study the impact of medical debt. Medical debt will be fo...
Risk sharing, in which individuals and households make both monetary and non-monetary transfers to each other, is an important mechanism through which households can cope with idiosyncratic risk in settings with little or no access to insurance. Moral hazard, in which individuals cannot observe the actions of others, may exist in these settings and limit the potential for risk sharing. The purpose of my research project is to investigate the extent to which moral hazard limits risk sharing and whether social proximity can help overcome the problems of the moral hazard. I use a laboratory experiment in Nairobi, Kenya with residents of the Kibera slum to address these questions.
We run two independent experiments to test the impact of financial scarcity on economic decision making. In the laboratory study, we exogenously introduce financial scarcity by randomly assigning a high or a low initial endowment to student subjects. In the field experiment, we compared rural residents from relatively rich and poor rural areas to characterize financial scarcity from external environment. We capture current pressure by comparing parents with differnet number of children in rural area, and examine long-term financial pressure by comparing parents with two boys to parents with other types of children in high bribe price regions. The core hypothesis of this study posits that financial scarcity prompts individuals to prioritize "saving money" over "making money" when faced ...
We employ a novel experimental design to investigate gender biases in performance evaluations, specifically examining whether women receive less recognition for their successes and face harsher penalties for their mistakes compared to men. Utilizing advanced artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC), we manipulate the perceived gender of players, allowing participants to evaluate identical performances attributed to different genders. This methodology isolates and measures the causal effects of gender bias. Our study involves Prolific participants assessing tennis highlights and unforced errors, ensuring evaluations are based solely on performance while varying perceived gender. Grounded in Regulatory Focus Theory, we explore how promotion focus (associated with ambition and risk...
This study investigates the role of stereotypes about gender abilities in explaining the existence of gender bias in redistributive choices, as recently found in \citet{cappelen2023experimental}. Using a worker/stakeholders design, we assess how gender bias in redistributive choices varies when spectators are provided with information about the type of assignments undertaken by workers. To this aim, we compare redistributive choices when spectators are informed that workers have conducted an unspecified assignment, a male-typed (visual-spatial rotation) assignment, or a female-typed (facial emotion recognition) assignment. Our findings will contribute to understanding gender inequality by exploring individuals' fairness preferences related to stereotypes about gender abilities. Moreov...
Our field partner Open Research Funders Group (ORFG) is interested in encouraging Open Science Practices (OSPs) among traditionally underrepresented academic institutions. ORFG’s key hypothesis is providing a small amount of funding to such institutions for targeted interventions can kickstart a broader movement towards open science practices. ORFG is in conversation with several funders to support such interventions which could form a part of a large field experiment testing the value of such funding. Here we propose to evaluate a smaller pilot ORFG is running with one funder to disburse about $100k to traditionally underrepresented institutions for OSP interventions.
We capture demand for data excludability through the willingness to pay for a real privacy commodity: data deletion from data brokers. We explore how the demand for privacy from data broker activities may differ depending on whether individuals are aware of data broker activities, the downstream consequences of commercial activity by data brokers, or from which entities brokers source individuals' data.
A description of this study will be in fields that will not become public until the experiment has completed.
The process of development is uneven, often leaving behind political minorities and marginalized groups. In this paper, we present new evidence of historically marginalized groups using the relatively nascent technology of grievance redressal mechanisms to exercise voice, negotiate conflict and, crucially, attempt to make development more equitable. Our reduced form causal results establish the following: lower-tiered marginalized representatives - who are also members of the state - use grievance redressal mechanisms to lobby upper tiers of the state for improved public good provision. We then show that marginalized representatives are particularly likely to file grievances when there is some pre-existing conflict between them and their upper-tier counterparts. Potential for conflict a...