AEA RCT Registry currently lists 1241 studies with locations in 106 countries.
MDRC launched the Performance-Based Scholarship Demonstration in 2008 to test an innovative strategy for addressing two policy objectives: increasing the financial support available to low-income students, and creating an incentive for such students to complete their courses and make more timely progress toward degrees. The idea is to provide a supplement to existing federal and state financial aid that is contingent on enrolling in a minimum number of credit hours and making passing grades. The performance-based scholarships are paid directly to students (rather than to the colleges or universities they attend) in order to reward students for their progress and to allow them to make choices of how best to support their schooling. For some, this may mean buying books or paying for trans...
Interventions that encourage healthy eating are becoming widespread across the world as a way to combat the obesity epidemic. An increasingly prevalent intervention is the use of nudges, which attempt to change behavior without restricting the individual’s choice. However, even if the nudge is successful at encouraging healthy eating, it is unknown whether the nudge is welfare increasing or welfare reducing for the individual. To answer this question, we develop a structural model and conduct a door-to-door food delivery field experiment where we randomize whether 1) individuals receive a calorie-and- nutrition information nudge and 2) whether we offer the food immediately or with a delay. To parse out welfare effects, we allow some individuals to sort in or out of the nudge by providin...
The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a research and demonstration project designed to test a policy innovation that makes work pay better than welfare. Conceived and funded by Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), managed by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC), and evaluated by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) and SRDC, SSP offered a temporary earnings supplement to selected long-term income assistance (IA) recipients in British Columbia and New Brunswick. The earnings supplement was a monthly cash payment available to single parents who had been on income assistance for at least one year and who left income assistance for full-time work. The supplement was paid on top of earnings from employment for up to three years, as long as the per...
Throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, secondary school completion is low, and female educational attainment lags male educational attainment. Many governments and NGOs try to address this issue by providing material support such as free uniforms and scholarships. We explore a potential alternative tool for increasing female human capital investment. A recent branch of economics, pioneered by James Heckman, has posited that differences in long-term outcomes (including wages and educational attainment) are in part driven by differences in non-cognitive skills (Heckman and Rubinstein, 2001). Non-cognitive skills are typically both difficult to measure and change, particularly among older children, but neuroscience research in recent years has shown that interpersonal skills may be best learned by...
This study is a long-term evaluation of the impact of microcredit in the Philippines. In partnership with two microcredit lenders, we introduced a credit scoring system that evaluates the credit worthiness of credit applicants. First-time borrowers who are marginally credit worthy are subject to a random credit decision where most receive an offer of credit but some are randomly rejected. By comparing those who were randomly approved for credit against those who were randomly denied, we will be able to measure the impact of access to microcredit. This study is a follow-up to Karlan and Zinman (2010).
We evaluate the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs. We use a randomized control trial and a very rich dataset collected as part of the evaluation to identify program impacts on the knowledge and take-up of social programs and the labor supply of targeted households. We find no consistent impact of the program on these outcomes, possibly because the way the pilot was implemented resulted in very light treatment in terms of home visits. Importantly, administrative data indicates that the program has been rolled out nationally in a very similar fashion, suggesting that this major national program is likely to fail in ...
In virtually every country, the need for organs for transplants far exceeds supply, leaving many patients to spend years waiting and even die before receiving a transplant. In the U.S. in 2009, for instance, where there are about 26 donors per million people, among candidates newly wait-listed for either a first or repeat kidney transplant the median wait time was 3.6 years (about one year for a liver transplant), and only slightly over 60% of individuals waitlisted ever received an organ. Approximately twenty individuals die each day because they cannot find a matching donor. In addition to the implications for transplant candidates, a kidney transplant, for example, also saves at least $200,000 over the life of the individual relative to on-going dialysis treatment. Donation rates...
In an experimental setting, we plan to test whether spectators have a willingness to pay to have an income distribution adhering to their fairness views implemented upon a pair of worker. Before spectators decide whether to implement their fairness views, we elicit participants perceived prevalence of their own fairness views to see whether this is correlated with their willingness to implement. In one treatment, spectators are informed about the empirical prevalence of their fairness views among the workers, before their willingness to pay is elicited. We argue that existence of a statistically significant treatment effect would be indicative of non-paternalistic motivation of implementing fairness views.
Corruption and mismanagement of government revenue is a widespread and serious obstacle to social and economic development in may poor countries. It has frequently been argued that taxing citizens is a promising strategy to promote good governance, because paying tax makes citizens demand more accountability in government expenditures. There is however very little causal evidence of the effect and what may be the underlying mechanisms. Using an online experiment, this project investigates whether and why demand for accountability is higher when revenue is generated through tax compared to when it is windfall. I propose that citizens care more about tax than windfall revenue for two reasons. First, tax revenue is generated by citizens’ hard work, increasing the weight they attach to reve...
This randomized control trial tested the impact of a school-only (SO) approach versus a life-wide learning (LWL) approach to supporting early primary grade learning in rural Rwanda. Schools in SO and LWL conditions received reading materials and teacher training. In addition, LWL villages received training and materials to enrich home and community literacy ecologies. Reading assessments administered to 1668 Primary 1 students in 2013 and again two years later showed that both treatments had positive impacts on learning; LWL produced greater impact. However, nearly one-third of students across all groups could not read at the end of the study, indicating that there is still significant work to do to ensure learning for all.