AEA RCT Registry currently lists 11787 studies with locations in 170 countries.
Social protection programs in Sierra Leone aim at supporting poor households, but current targeting tools often leave out food insecure households. Partnering with the government of Sierra Leone, we test various tools for better including food insecure households. Specifically, we test proxy-means testing and CBT instruments designed at selecting food insecure households, and compare these with the traditional PMT used by the government.
Parenthood continues to affect mothers’ and fathers’ careers differently. Many countries have introduced paternity leave (PL) policies to reduce the economic costs of childbirth for mothers and to promote more equal sharing of childcare. Yet, despite generous entitlements, PL take-up remains limited. This project investigates the barriers that discourage PL take-up, distinguishing between (i) lack of information, (ii) career concerns, (iii) stereotypes, and (iv) organizational challenges. We examine whether these barriers are real or (mis)perceived, and potential channels of norm change in the workplace. To do so, we conduct a national survey of male employees in Italy, complemented by a smaller female control sample, to measure knowledge, perceptions, and beliefs about PL. We then test...
Our study asks two questions. One, do extremely large, intervention-driven early learning gains in foundational literacy and numeracy, achieved among primary school-aged children in extremely income-poor settings persist or fade out over time? Two, do these gains have any knock-on effects for families and communities? We answer these questions by following up with participants from studies in The Gambia and Guinea Bissau which showed large learning gains from bundled interventions targeting early grade reading and learning skills. Several years after the conclusion of these studies, we will return to find and interview the original trial participants enrolled in the studies, their families, and leaders in their schools and their villages. We will also administer tests of learning, both ...
Can corporations do evil without being run by evil people? If so, why? This study explores these questions through a survey experiment. Participants face a moral trade-off involving a financially beneficial yet ethically costly decision. The experimental design randomly varies contextual and structural features of the decision to examine how each factor influences the decision-making process. In addition, we aim to analyze individual heterogeneity using measures from moral psychology to understand why participants differ in their responses. The goal is to shed light on how context and incentives shape moral judgment.
This survey explores credit card interest cost misperceptions among U.S. credit card holders.
Collective action problems pose significant barriers to addressing environmental problems in developing countries. In this project, we explore potential solutions to these challenges within the context of a rural area in a developing country. Our experiments compare the standard education approach which disseminates information about the environmental problem with three novel interventions. The first equips participants with a tailored set of tools aimed at enhancing cooperation and social capital within the community and thereby facilitating collective action. The second treatment adds a means for the community to monitor the environmental problem in public spaces. In the final variant, we provide additional information that enables the community to better understand their own exposure...
Labor markets in low-income settings are shaped by pervasive frictions. Thin labor demand and weak intermediation networks, limited screening capacity, and imperfect information on both sides of the market can generate misaligned expectations, misdirected search, and low-quality matches (Breza and Kaur, 2025; Caria and Orkin, 2024). In this project – rather than focusing on firm-side screening and monitoring (see Bassi and Nansamba, 2022) – we randomize personalized information provided to workers about sector- and employer-specific hiring feasibility, and examine how this shapes their employment preferences, and which sectors they target. We will implement a two-sided incentivized résumé-rating (IRR) design (Kessler et al., 2019) that separately measures (i) firm-side screening and (ii...
We run a study on U.S. small business lending. See Experimental Design (Hidden) for details.
Smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa face severe and persistent information barriers. A new wave of AI-assisted digital information technologies has the potential to overcome these barriers at scale, delivering personalized, hyperlocal agronomic advice at low cost. Yet little is known about the impacts of these technologies and how they diffuse. This pilot study investigates these questions in the context of a novel AI-assisted agricultural advisory tool called Virtual Agronomist. Farmers can use this technology to generate tailored nutrient management plans based on high-resolution soil maps, diagnose plant health and pest problems, and access weather advisories. We investigate the impacts of this tool on farmer practices and agricultural outcomes. We also use this context to stud...
We elicit fairness preferences using a spectator design, and adapt their design to measure preferences for predistribution relative to redistribution. In the experiment, participants in the role of ``spectators'' determine the incomes of participants in the role of ``workers,'' who earned these incomes from a real-effort task. We focus on two important dimensions that vary between predistribution and redistribution: the timing of the spectator's decision relative to the accrual of worker earnings---before incomes are accrued (ex-ante) vs. after (ex-post)---and the context of changing earnings relative to changing a base payment to both workers. Additionally, using open-ended and closed-ended questions, we will elicit the spectators' explanations for their implemented inequality, their p...