AEA RCT Registry currently lists 2010 studies with locations in 120 countries.
Research has shown that young babies and children living in rural China are not reaching their full developmental potential. A 2013 survey of 2,000 rural (country-based) infants aged 6-12 months in Shaanxi Province, for example, showed that around 40% were significantly delayed in either their cognitive (thinking) or psychomotor (physical) development. Furthermore, rather than improving over time, the number of children suffering from developmental delays actually increased to 53% as the children became toddlers, indicating that rural children are falling further and further behind their healthy urban (town-based) counterparts. The Chinese Ministry of Health is aware of these numbers and is extremely concerned, as these infants represent nearly one-half of all those in China. Why are r...
This study aims at estimating the impact of information letters on the uptake of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) by farmers in Northern France. PES are subsidies compensating farmers for the adoption of green practices. The European Union Common Agricultural Policy (EU CAP) is home to the largest PES program in the world. PES programs are voluntary and thus their efficiency strongly depends on farmers being informed about the existence of the PES. In this project, we sent letters to eligible farmers (located near zones where PES are available) informing them of their eligibility, of the type of program available to them (practices subsidized and subsidy amount) and providing them with the contact information to caseworkers in charge of helping them with their application. We a...
Impact evaluation of an entrepreneurship program implemented in Western Cote d'Ivoire. The program focuses on promoting productive self-employment to sustain livelihoods, in a rural area which was hit by the post-electoral conflict of the last decade. It aims to sustain vulnerable populations through entrepreneurship training and access to financial capital. Shared prosperity is expected to reinforce social cohesion, as well as more direct interventions such as a peace building training, and repeated interactions with other ethnic groups during trainings and meetings. This is all the more relevant in this area which is ethnically fractionalized following conflict displacement.
A growing number of studies point to the importance of early childhood intervention for fulfilling childhood development potential. The critical period before age three is considered to be a crucial “window”, during which interventions designed to improve child development can have significant and lasting effects, even into adulthood. Moreover, intervention during this time period is considered to be the most cost-effective from a policy perspective. This project seeks to explore the most cost-effective interventions and associated implementation protocols to help to young babies and children living in rural China to reach their full developmental potentials. To do so, we propose to conduct a large-scale randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of a Comprehensive Early Chil...
The primary purpose of this program is to increase the coverage of full immunization rates among children under 12 months of age in seven poor-performing districts of the state of Haryana, India. This will be done by providing non-cash incentives to parents to motivate them to consistently immunize their children. Previous research conducted in Rajasthan, India shows that lack of demand for immunization may be a key reason for low rates of full immunization, even when supply-side bottlenecks have been removed. Thus, this study will rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of providing incentives to beneficiaries in increasing full first-year routine immunization rates in Haryana. It will also look at the scalability of this approach in improving immunization coverage under the current gove...
Payments for ecosystems services (PES) and conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are popular and often effective policy approaches to spur behavior change: paying people to undertake behaviors they otherwise would not. Behaviors being “incentivized” usually benefit society, for example reducing deforestation with PES and increasing vaccination and school attendance with CCTs. However, there remains limited evidence on the effectiveness of PES-type interventions in settings of high deforestation and limited institutional capacity, and no studies have focused on fire—an increasingly prominent way to clear land. Our project is based in West Kalimantan, one of the main provinces where Indonesia’s catastrophic 2015—16 fires were concentrated. The goal of the study is to estimate the effects of c...
We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how natives perceive immigrants and how perceptions influence their preferences for redistribution. We collect respondents’ detailed, quantitative perceptions about immigrants’ numbers, origins, religion, net benefits received, unemployment rate, poverty, and education. We compare these perceptions to reality and assess how accurate they are. We also ask detailed questions about support for various tax and transfer policies, social insurance, and migration policies. This allows us to study the correlation between perceptions of immigration and support for redistributive policies. In addition, we perform four randomized experimental treatments, to check that the correlations between immigration perc...
Pay-for-performance (P4P) has been shown to be effective in improving job performance in both private and public organizations (e.g., Bandiera et al. 2008, Gertler and Vermeersch 2013, Muralidharan and Sundararaman 2011, Banerjee et al 2008, Duflo et al 2012). The existing literature has however studied the effect of P4P within a single tier of the organizational hierarchy, mostly focusing on lower-tier workers and rarely paying attention to their supervisors and/or managers. The literature has also ignored the fact that incentivizing one layer of the organization (either the lower- or upper-tier) might affect effort across both layers of the hierarchy, either through effort complementarities or fairness concerns (Tirole 1992, Holstrom 2017). This project aims to assess the effectivenes...
Access to irrigated land is a key factor in determining a household's income and its food security in rural parts of Africa. The construction of large-scale irrigation perimeters comprising networks of primary, secondary and tertiary canals and often times pumping stations is one avenue to providing access to irrigated land on a large scale. From 2009 to 2014, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) invested around 100M USD into the construction of an irrigated perimeter in the Boucle du Mouhoun region of Burkina Faso, the Di perimeter. After the original owners of the land were compensated through higher quality but smaller plots of land, MCC distributed 710 hectares of irrigated land via a public lottery, called the Di Lottery. Five hundred and three Di Lottery winners were ra...
The epidemiological transition has resulted in an increased burden of non-communicable diseases such as hypertension throughout the developing world. As countries adapt to this new environment, they must find cost-effective ways of screening for, and treating these diseases. With the proliferation of mobile technology as well as the increased evidence for the effectiveness of cash transfers we will be conducting a randomized-controlled trial in rural Tanzania to examine the usage of an SMS-based approach of informing individuals of the dangers of non-communicable diseases and offering financial incentives for hypertension and diabetes screening. Beyond estimating the overall impact of this program, we will measure how much of the impact is derived from offsetting the opportunity cost of...