AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8585 studies with locations in 167 countries.
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...
This study explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate medical overuse by examining the decision-making processes of physicians in a controlled experimental setting. Medical overuse, characterized by unnecessary interventions that may harm patients and inflate healthcare costs, is a significant issue in both developed and developing healthcare systems. By integrating AI tools that offer evidence-based recommendations, this research aims to understand the extent to which AI can influence physician behavior and reduce overtreatment. Our experimental design involves a lab-in-the-field setting within a medical school, where we manipulate both monetary incentives and the availability of AI assistance across different groups of medical students. We employ...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is developing at a rapid pace and has great potential to transform many aspects of life. It has already made inroads into the healthcare sector, providing assistance to doctors and researchers in areas such as diagnostics and drug discovery. However, many of these uses of AI encompass an algorithm that is trained on specific data for one specific task. Recent developments in ‘large language models’ offer a glimpse into a future where doctors may have an AI assistant by their side at all times. Studies have already demonstrated that large language models (GPT-4 & MedPaLM) perform just as well as humans on medical licensing exams, demonstrating that these models have processed this information. Yet performing well on licensing exams does not equate to performi...
We study whether individuals engage in more moral behaviors when faced with uncertain outcomes. This hypothesis comes from a popular magical belief that moral behaviors lead to good luck under uncertainty. We conduct two online experiments in which we manipulate the level of uncertainty associated with potential payoffs and observe participants’ choices in a subsequent moral decision. In the first experiment, the moral decision is the same as the decision which determines the uncertain payoff. While this experiment induces the magical belief to the greatest extent, it suffers from confounder such as regret aversion. In the second experiment, we relax the direct connection by separating the moral decision and the decision that determines the uncertainty payoff to explore whether people's...
If employers hold biased beliefs about a particular group, they may be less likely to hire workers from this group, preventing them from learning and correcting their beliefs. This paper explores whether temporary affirmative action can correct biased beliefs and in turn improve representation even after the policy is lifted. I elicit employer hiring decisions and beliefs about potential employee performance in two between-subject experimental treatments: a control treatment without affirmative action and a temporary affirmative action treatment.