AEA RCT Registry currently lists 3109 studies with locations in 142 countries.
We aim to understand whether giving or receiving advice affects the job search behavior of soon-to-be university graduates and their subsequent labor market outcomes. Relatedly, we will examine the impact of their first and second-order beliefs about particular social norms.
Quotas may generate adverse selection if high quality candidates avoid quota firms. This project will examine this question and identify when adverse selection is more prevalent.
The Building Evidence on Employment Strategies for Low-Income Families (BEES) project will study up to 21 innovative programs aimed at improving employment outcomes, advances in the labor market, and economic security for low-income individuals and families. Selection of these programs (or “sites”) for inclusion in the BEES project is currently underway. Program services to be evaluated could include employment and training services such as job search assistance, job readiness services, vocational education, and coaching; employment barrier removal services such as those targeting substance use disorder and mental health; and other services aimed at promoting and supporting employment and economic security. Randomized control trial designs will be prioritized where an impact study is ap...
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Results Based Financing (RBF) has been heralded as an effective tool for motivating health workers to improve maternal and child health indicators. However, focus has been on frontline health workers and little attention has been given to Community Health workers (CHWs). Yet CHWs have been found to be an effective cadre in improving maternal, newborn, and child health indicators, including ANC and facility deliveries. The study proposes to evaluate the effect of the community RBF on initiation of antenatal care in the first trimester. To achieve this, we will employ a cluster-randomized trial with pairwise matching where 49 health facilities are randomly allocated to the treatment arm and 49 to the control arm in Central province in Zambia. The study is targeted at Central province due ...
In contrast to almost half of the world’s female population that is working, only about 25 percent of India’s half a billion adult females report being part of the labor force (United Nations 2013 and India’s Periodic Labor Force Survey 2017, respectively). This low rate of Indian women's labor market participation is puzzling for a country that has experienced rapid fertility transition (World Bank, various years) and broad increases in women’s educational attainment (Census of India 2001 and 2011), along with substantial economic growth since the 1990s. Instead, these changes have been accompanied by a consistently low share of women working in urban areas (Klasen and Pieters 2015) and a real reduction in the share of women working in rural areas, between 1987 and 2011 (Afridi, Dink...
Barriers to commercial farming are probably the most significant frictions to agricultural development in Africa. Moreover, improving agricultural productivity is the most effective way to improving living standards of the poor given their significant dependence on (subsistence) agriculture and the larger productivity gaps between agriculture and other sectors. The Government of Uganda is committed to vegetable oil development in order to promote a competitive, profitable and sustainable agricultural sector as the basis for job creation, export development and provision of improved livelihoods for the rural population. For this purpose, IFAD supported two phases of the Vegetable Oil Development Project (VODP), joint with local public-private partnership. The first round of Vegetable...
In his seminal work, Becker (1968) showed that the gain from behavior that harms others, the cost of that behavior and the probability of getting caught have an effect on the decision to commit criminal acts. However, these mechanisms are not enough to prevent crime in general and certainly not enough to curb more modest anti-social behavior such as dishonesty. Other than the monetary cost of dishonesty, people also experience psychological distress from dishonest behavior. This comes about through the cognitive dissonance or mental discomfort which arises because of the contradiction between a person’s beliefs about herself and her behavior in real life. A person might well like to think of herself as honest but behaving in conflict with this ideal would create cognitive dissonance and...
Attitudes towards social groups such as women and racial minorities are important determinants of decision-making, but they are difficult to measure for individuals in policy-making roles. We propose to address this challenge by studying U.S. appellate court judges, for whom we have large corpora of written text (their published opinions). Using published opinions, we construct a judge-specific measure of gender-stereotyped language (gender slant) by looking at the linguistic association of words identifying gender (male versus female) and words identifying gender stereotypes (career versus family). To improve our understanding of how lexical slant can be interpreted, we plan to conduct an online survey experiment aimed at eliciting gender preferences from judges with the objective of c...
Automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems use artificial intelligence to score and comment essays. We designed an experiment with two treatment arms in Brazil to study the effects of AWE-based pedagogy programs on writing skills. In both treatments, teachers were stimulated to use an AWE system that provides students with instantaneous performance signals on their essays. In both cases, students receive a final grade and formative feedback. However, in one of them this grade is set by human graders, who supervise the feedback and deliver a delayed but arguably richer assessment. The mechanisms we describe range from changes in the amount of training to the reallocation of teachers' time to different tasks. The results help address the question of whether and how these technologies can ...