AEA RCT Registry currently lists 12590 studies with locations in 171 countries.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that laws and institutions shape social norms — not only through enforcement but through their signalling function: communicating what is socially acceptable and legitimising or delegitimising group identities in the public sphere. This signalling effect is theorised to be especially powerful when institutional signals are reinforced by religious authority, yet causal evidence from low-institutional-legitimacy, high-religious-salience contexts remains scarce. In contexts such as Pakistan, where the credibility of secular state institutions is constrained and Islamic authority operates as the primary mechanism of norm legitimation, understanding how religious framing modulates the effect of institutional signals on public behaviour is both theoreti...
Employment programs deliver job information to individual jobseekers, although employment decisions are often made within households. We study both margins in two separately randomized experiments covering 11,781 unemployed youth in rural Upper Egypt: what concrete, verified, tailored job information does on its own, and whether the household configuration in which the same information is delivered changes what youth do with it. Information moves behavior sharply. It raises the probability of taking a concrete step toward employment by 16.1 percentage points in the first experiment and 11.2 in the second, against control rates near a third, and men and women respond alike despite very different prior work histories. It produces no statistically detectable employment gain within seven to...
This study examines how attachment to social networks, home villages, and ancestral farmland constrains climate adaptation among farmers in Pakistan. We recruit 1,440 households across 120 villages stratified by flood exposure. Two crossed household-level randomized treatments are administered during face-to-face surveys: an information treatment that provides historical flood frequency and projected climate change impacts, and an insurance framing treatment that presents an identical index crop insurance product as income protection, adaptation-enabling, or attachment-preserving. We record their past and planned adaptation decisions, demand for insurance, and relocation preferences using displacement vignettes that vary their people, place, and plot.
We evaluate the effectiveness of gender-reflective framing in health communication aimed at increasing HPV vaccination intentions. The human papillomavirus (HPV) causes several cancers in both women and men, yet vaccination coverage in Germany remains below the WHO target and exhibits a pronounced gender gap. Gender-reflective framing emphasizes protection of a specific gender group and may activate identity-based or empathetic motivations in parental decision-making regarding the vaccination of their children. To test this mechanism, we conduct a randomized 2 × 2 × 2 factorial online survey experiment with German parents (target N ≈ 2,160). The treatment varies whether the informational message emphasizes cervical cancer (female frame) or penile cancer (male frame), while the parent’...
Health and education, in theory, could have large complementarities, with improvements in one yielding productivity gains in the other. Yet, experimental evidence on these complementarities remains limited. We conduct a factorial experiment, randomizing school meals access -- one of the most popular health interventions among governments -- alongside an effective educational approach, targeting instruction. We randomize 125 primary schools in Zambia, a context in which both of these interventions are scaling nationwide. Our factorial design enables us to identify a) the effect of school meals, b) encouragement to implement targeted instruction, and c) effects of school meals combined with targeted instruction. We identify effects and complementarities on several health and education out...
We investigate how leaders' gender affects group members' willingness to contribute their ideas and their performance in a series of real-effort tasks using a randomised online experiment. Participants will be assigned to groups of three with one leader and two group members, with each group member responsible for completing a series of tasks and reporting their willingness to answer for the group in each real-effort task. First, we will examine whether participants' willingness to answer for the group is affected by their leader's gender. Second, we will examine whether the quality of their answers is affected by their leader's gender. Third, we are interested in the quality gaps across treatments at different levels of willingness. Finally, we will examine whether participants' conf...
Comparative advantage is a foundational concept in economics, yet little is known about how individuals recognize and act upon it in everyday economic decisions involving specialization and cooperation. We experimentally study how cooperation and the allocation of gains differ when cooperation can be based on absolute advantage versus when it can only be based on comparative advantage, and, in the latter case, how behavior varies between universally advantaged and disadvantaged positions. We also investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying these behavioral patterns.
This online randomized crossover experiment examines how alternative collaboration arrangements and team incentive structures affect effort and performance in a timed visual retail task. Each participant completes four incentivized rounds under four collaboration conditions presented in a randomized, counterbalanced order. Randomization occurs at the individual level through computer assignment to one of four balanced condition sequences. We plan to recruit up to 220 participants, targeting at least 180 analyzable participants.
This project studies how the composition of student peer groups influences educational outcomes in higher education. Students in several first-year programs are assigned to classes using alternative class formation procedures, generating variation in peer composition. The study uses administrative and survey data to examine associations between peer characteristics, academic outcomes, and student experiences during the first year of study.
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