AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8574 studies with locations in 167 countries.
This study is about understanding mechanisms underlying the long-term effects of culture.
We examine whether and how professional investors use human capital information in their investment decisions. Human capital has become a vital component of firms’ operations, with annual expenses related to employees as a share of revenue increasing by more than 50% since 1990, compared to no growth for physical capital expenditures. Despite the increasing financial materiality of human capital investments, U.S. firms are required to disclose only two metrics related to non-executive employees, the total number of employees and the median wage. As a result, investors have demanded more information from firms and regulators. We will conduct an experiment among professional investors to determine whether and how details about a firm’s human capital management impact their valuations of t...
As the climate crisis worsens and more people in the United States personally experience the climate change impacts, anxieties about climate change impacts also grow. Two such climate anxieties have received considerable attention in popular press – numerous newspaper articles, blogs, podcasts, and now general interest books link the decision to have children to climate. The first anxiety frames the decision to have children as one of the behaviors contributing to climate change the most: children and their children will contribute greenhouse gas emissions through their life-long consumption (they will own houses, cars, etc.). The second frames the decision to have children in light of the future impacts of climate on children – the world we are leaving to future generations is more unc...
Student evaluation of teaching (SET) scores is one of the most common criterion used by universities to judge instructor quality. Such evaluations are often biased negatively for female instructors. It is more pronounced for junior female instructors, and for the female instructors teaching a technical course, for instance, the ones involving more math. Such discrimination stems mostly from the evaluations by male students and have been tested causally in several developed countries. Our study proposes to test this hypothesis in a developing country context where the evidence on gender-bias against women instructors in academia is limited. Using a natural field experiment conducted with over 500 students of Principles of Microeconomics class at a large private university in India, w...
Can exposing women to role models improve their participation in community decision-making and their perceived voice and agency beyond the household? And can additionally providing skills training on identifying policy priorities, setting goals, and speaking in public bolster any effects? We consider these research questions in the eastern Indian state of Odisha in the context of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) program, in which citizens are invited to request individual and community assets to be constructed by the program via a participatory process. Across 94 communities in 4 districts, we will gather 1400 groups of 4--6 women each. We have three study arms. All groups will receive an information leaflet containing details on the formal processes...
This study is an update from our initial equal opportunity experiment. The initial equal opportunity experiment is now considered a pilot experiment. Equal opportunity has wide applicability throughout society. It touches upon access to education, employment, legal representation, etc. Given that equal opportunity has different meanings to different people (i.e., equal opportunity in outcomes, resources, access, etc.), we use a simplified definition based on the different types of equal opportunity mentioned in Arneson (2018). We define equal opportunity to mean that individuals should have similar access to “resources” except when one’s innate ability leads to a difference in resource allocation. This project explores how economic inequality created by an institution affects pro...
In this paper, we provide experimental evidence on the effect of improving childcare quality on prices and profits of childcare providers, as well as the effects on families and children. Specifically, we partner with Kidogo, a social enterprise that provides training and mentorship to daycare providers. We randomize the entry of Kidogo into 30 low-income, urban communities of Kenya, leaving 30 communities as comparison. We then analyze the effect of their entry with detailed surveys of approximately 2000 providers. The main outcome measures are the price, quality, profits, and availability of childcare 6 months, and 12 months, and 24 months after entry. We pair that data with 2,100 surveys of families with small children in the same communities to examine the effect of improving childc...
We describe the design and analysis plan for a field experiment conducted in the summer of 2019 in Central Malawi. In this lab-in-the-field experiment, we study the willingness to pay (WTP) for information about soil fertility and the accompanying management recommendations. The randomization is set up to explore the degree to which individual contributions towards purchasing soil tests differ depending on the actual and perceived heterogeneity in soils in the village. This pre-analysis plan is being submitted after data collection but before any analysis took place.
We are conducting a conduct a correspondence study to measure hiring discrimination against transgender job applicants for entry-level positions in the US labor market. We randomly assign gender identity and race to fictitious resumes. We measure discrimination against both transgender women and men as well as non-binary applicants relative to cisgender men and women, and we compare differences between White and Black applicants. We consider labor markets across the United States in order to examine heterogeneity in discrimination based on local political climates.
In the current nudging literature, several have called for more research on the combination of behavioral interventions as a promising avenue to see larger effects (Nisa et al., 2019), and it has also been claimed that combinations of nudges and monetary interventions may be particularly effective in promoting pro-environmental behavior (see e.g. Alt et al., 2024). Most of the research on policy mixes has been done in the energy domain (Allcott et al., 2014; Drews et al., 2020; Fanghella et al., 2021) and there is a lack of research on policy mixes in the food domain. Furthermore, the existing research on policy mixing in the food domain mainly focuses on promoting healthy food products (Ahn & Lusk, 2021; Papoutsi et al., 2015; Vo et al., 2022). The purpose of this study is, first, to i...