AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8574 studies with locations in 167 countries.
This study examines the effects of neglecting correlation in choice under risk. While alternative theories of choice under risk, such as regret aversion theory (Loomes and Sudgen, 1987) and salience theory (Bordalo, Gennaioli and Shleifer, 2012) suggest agents attend to the underlying correlation and derive utility from state contingencies, it remains an open question how people process these decisions. The repercussions of correlation neglect have paramount implications for the modern portfolio theory for risk-averse agents who seek to minimize variance for a given expected return (Markowitz, 1952). Relatedly, it may lead to missed hedging or arbitrage opportunities (Eyster and Weizsacker, 2016). How people process correlated risky choice in the evaluation of trade-offs between differe...
Wage transparency in the workplace matters to employers and employees alike. Some countries such as Norway have introduced wage transparency by allowing constituents to search for wage levels through an online search. Employees have several interests that are related to wage transparency, such as knowing that they are receiving a fair wage relative to their coworkers or knowing their relative position in a social or professional ladder. Managers are aware that their employees value this information as a way to “understand and contextualize their workplace,” yet face trade-offs (Collins & Mossholder, 2014). In the interest of encouraging productive employees, increasing or maintaining job satisfaction, increasing trust, and reducing employee turnover, employers and policymakers face the ...
Classroom features affect the learning process in schools. Temperature levels inside classrooms, an important classroom feature, have been shown to affect learning outcomes. In this context, we are interested in looking at low cost solutions aimed at reducing ambient temperatures in schools and anganwadis (a government run system of child care in rural India). Through our collaboration with the Energy Management Centre (EMC) of the state of Kerala we will be using roof paint with a high Solar Reflective index(SRI) to cool the roofs in government schools and anganwadis using a randomised controlled design. The study will look at the impact of cool roofs on indoor temperature, thermal comfort and also on attendance, cognitive effort and learning outcomes of school and anganwadi students. ...
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...