AEA RCT Registry currently lists 3205 studies with locations in 142 countries.
We hypothesize that poor caregivers do not receive frequent and timely feedback on their child’s growth trajectory, which constrains their understanding of the relationship between different childcare inputs and growth. This is especially important for pockets of poverty where the majority of children may be short for their age i.e. the reference child that caregivers have (children from within their community) may also be stunted. Consequently, despite access to resources like information on optimal practices through public health information campaigns and nutrition counseling, caregivers typically do not translate this information into action by adjusting their inputs. Moreover, child development may come into focus only during the regular visits to their local clinic where such feedb...
This paper presents a research protocol for a cluster randomized trial to study the impact of an innovative social and financial skill teaching program for upper primary children aged between 9-16 years, across two districts in Himachal Pradesh, India. A total of 74 schools were randomly allocated to the treatment or control group. Outcomes to be measured are level of self-efficacy, knowledge of basic financial concepts, ability to solve simple financial tasks, level of patience and risk preference, amount of money saved, level of numerical ability, and knowledge on civil rights and responsibilities. The evaluation is funded by Echidna Giving.
Online experiment to study how signaling motives for prosocial behavior interact with incentives for bunching
Innovation is a core component of a growing economy. Yet, it is still to be fully understood how to best foster it. We study in the laboratory the effect of making strategies or profits salient on the choice of participants to innovate using a management game. To do so, we use participants’ generated reports and vary their content to be either strategy or profit focused, keeping everything else, including a pay-for-performance incentives scheme, fixed. We expect that participants who are asked to report their strategies will be more innovative than those who report their profits.
The purpose of this research project is to find field evidence of hidden costs of control as they were found in the lab by Falk and Kosfeld (2006). Moreover, we aim to uncover heterogeneity in the population through elicitation of agents’ social preferences in a subsequent stage; and match social preferences to the behavioral response observed in the field.
Female labor force participation (henceforth FLPF) is very low in Saudi Arabia and social norms appear to be a constraint to female employment in the country. In the first round of our experiment, we surveyed groups of Saudi Arabian men and found that most men privately support female labor force participation while believing that others hold much more conservative views. At the end of the survey, participants were given a choice between a $5 Amazon gift card and the opportunity to sign-up their wife for an online job matching service. An information treatment showing randomly selected participants the distribution of true beliefs increased the likelihood that participants chose the job matching service sign-up, suggesting that correcting individual beliefs about others may be an effect...
Although EdTech is rapidly expanding in developing countries little is known about its marginal productivity. Based on a large field experiment we will provide the first test in the literature of whether the educational production function is concave, convex or linear in computer assisted learning (CAL). Results are fundamental to understanding optimal investments in technology-based education. We will use two treatment arms with different levels of time on CAL and a pure control group to estimate effects on student achievement. We will also examine cost-effectiveness and whether different types of students face different production functions. Using two treatment intensities will also allow us to avoid the potential problem of choosing a treatment intensity that is too low or too high, ...
Institutions are important determinants of social preferences. This project investigates the causal effects that the organization and structure of property rights institutions have on distributive preferences. Specifically, we study a reform of property rights over land implemented in West Africa, that transformed collective and informal rights over land in a system akin to formalized private ownership. We test whether experiencing the reform shaped distributive preferences and how different sources of inequality (merit or luck) affect inequality acceptance.
Encouraging Multilingual Early Reading as the Groundwork for Education (EMERGE) is a cluster-randomized evaluation of a program that provides Kenyan parents with illustrated children’s storybooks and modified dialogic reading training. The ongoing study employs a 73-community cluster-randomized design to examine the impact of a cost-effective parent education and storybook distribution program on preschool-aged children in rural Kenya. Within this main design, we use a within-cluster caregiver-level randomization to examine the impact of the language of the children's storybooks.
Incentivizing the take-up of preventive health services can be effective to increase access in low-income countries. Yet even when care is incentivized, some individuals may not be sensitive to price because they still fail to see the benefits of using preventive services on their health. This may be particularly the case when individuals suffer from diseases whose symptoms are not salient, or when the hassle costs of setting up an appointment may outweigh its perceived benefits. Hence, policy-makers may be concerned that universal financial incentives for preventive services that fail to target the most at-risk individuals can generate wastage. In this study, we compare three ways of providing a preventive medical check-up for cardiovascular diseases (CVD): (i) free provision of the me...