AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8586 studies with locations in 167 countries.
Following a successful pilot study (AEARCTR-0006390), the California Policy Lab will evaluate the impact of the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s Office’s Pre-Arraignment Representation & Review Team (PARR) during the expansion and scale-up of the program on pre-trial detention, release at arraignment, and case outcomes, and longer term recidivism outcomes. The study will use a random process to assign legal staff to clients who are booked on felony charges and not released within 24 hours of booking. Specifically, using a pre-determined schedule, legal staff will provide PARR services to clients booked 6 days per week, rotating the 7th day across days of the week over the study period.
Our experimental design takes inspiration from the ideas discussed in Schwartzstein and Sunderam (2021) and explores when and why persuasion using models might occur.
Workers and firms in low and middle-income countries operate in a credit-constrained environment characterized by asymmetric information. Firms are unaware of the productivity and trustworthiness of the worker, and workers are unsure whether the firms will pay them on time or at all. Neither the worker nor the firm can commit to a contract. Theory suggests that a consequence of these market failures and the firm's own credit constraints is that firms should offer back-loaded contracts. We will test this theoretical prediction in an experiment where we offer to hire workers for firms with different payment structures. Workers dislike back-loaded contracts because they can't trust the firm to abide by them (due to limited commitment on the firm side) and due to consumption credit constrai...
This project studies the role of risk-sharing and social networks in the mitigation of local environmental risks. We focus on two aspects: first, risk mitigation through informal insurance contracts between households; and, second, the importance of social monitoring for enforcing informal insurance contracts. Our objective is to understand whether commitment contracts between pairs of households meant to insure the consumption of either household can help mitigate local environmental risk. To test this, we have chosen as context a major disaster of natural origin: toxic levels of arsenic in groundwater pumped by millions of private wells in Bangladesh. We further hypothesize that compliance in informal agreements to cooperate needs monitoring by local peers for enforcement. To test ou...
In Senegal, a significant share of adolescents who leave formal education before completing middle school seek to learn skills through informal apprenticeships, and young adults who have completed informal apprenticeships have more stable employment than similarly skilled youths who have not chosen this path. Despite its attractiveness among less educated youth, informal apprenticeship training in Senegal is characterized by low quality, long duration (five years on average) and a lack of certification. Neither the sectors involved, nor the apprenticeships are regulated, and so the content of the training depends only on a workshop’s activity, which varies considerably within trades. To improve skills transfers through the traditional apprenticeship system, the PEJA program (“Improving ...
Notions of rest and self-care – be it meditation, napping, or a walk in nature – have become increasingly popular, and recent economic research suggests these activities can improve not only mental well-being but also performance overall. Nevertheless, uptake and engagement of these kinds of activities remain low – especially in stressful labor market situations. In the context of online labor markets, we explore workers’ beliefs on and decisions to invest in rest. We document the productivity effects of mandated rest periods during a strenuous work task. Furthermore, we look at who chooses to invest in rest when given the option and ask whether “break-skippers” and “break-takers” are maximizing their earnings.
We aim at exploring the effects of the timing of payment on employees’ behaviour in an employer-employee relationship and its mechanisms.
Female-owned firms in Sub-Saharan Africa have lower profits and less access to capital. A common approach to promoting capital access for female business owners is to reserve loans or other capital for women. However, loan application processes remain a barrier to access. Using an information experiment with female small business owners in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we study whether limiting loans to female business owners increases women's willingness to apply for those loans. This is a follow-up study to "Gender, Competition, and Requests for Capital: Experimental Evidence on Female Prioritization" (AEARCTR-0011271).
Traditional explanations of Americans’ conspiracy beliefs by motivated reasoning like partisanship and ideology may mask other stronger motives in their conspiratorial beliefs about international politics. I navigate my research to the effect of negative emotions and perceived foreign threats on Americans' conspiracy beliefs about international relations, hypothesizing that the negative emotions and foreign threats perceived by Americans are significant motivators for their beliefs in conspiracy theories related to global affairs. The prior attitude held towards specific countries leads respondents to be more inclined to believe in conspiratorial statements associated with those countries. This research initially conducted an observational study using the American National Election Surv...
We use an RCT to evaluate the UN refugee-agency UNHCR’s Community Sponsorship (CS) model in Sweden. The CS model matches newly arrived refugees with local contacts from the host municipality in order to improve language skills, cultural exchange, and new social networks. We have partnered with several municipalities that work closely with the local CSOs to create these matches. Our study will be the first randomized evaluation of this popular program, which has helped resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees worldwide. As such, this project will contribute to the broad research and societal discussion on integration by studying an innovative and scalable intervention. We evaluate the intervention based on its effects on social and economic integration, as well as values, health, and w...