AEA RCT Registry currently lists 8642 studies with locations in 167 countries.
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...
The scale of fake news and misinformation is constantly growing in our hyper-connected world, which may have grave economic and societal consequences. For example, fake news and rumors can manipulate elections, threaten public health, and hype up (or down) investors leading to artificial market disturbances and instability. Designing appropriate social and economic policies in order to combat fake news and to improve the resilience of individuals, institutions, and markets to misinformation calls for a systematic investigation into the underlying cognitive, psychological, and institutional determinants of the belief in falsehoods and resistance to factual information. In this project, we aim to investigate the role of cognitive ability, overconfidence, and motivated reasoning (due to pa...
This project aim to explore why policies promoting gender equality remain underrepresented in conservative countries. We explore these issues in Turkey, a country that ranks 124th in gender equality measurements, 134th in female economic participation and opportunity, and 112th in women's political empowerment according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022. We aim to use experimental variation to evaluate voter response to campaign promises on ``gender issues'' compared to voters in a control group who are not exposed to any campaign. To disentangle party or canvasser persuasion effects (supply) on voter behavior from campaign content (demand), we estimate the differential effect of the gender-related campaign to a placebo, a second campaign treatment arm on ``gen...
The study aims to understand the role of social media use for professional purposes in determining academics’ career outcomes. Eligible participants who consent to enroll in the study complete a baseline survey. Some randomly selected subjects receive emails with suggestions about how to use Twitter effectively for professional advancement, as well as monetary incentives to either (1) browse Twitter for relevant content or (2) create original posts (“tweets”) on Twitter. The study concludes with follow-up surveys.
To reduce the carbon footprint of our society, deployment of renewable energies needs to be acclerated. At the same time, carbon intensive energy production plants as well as nuclear power plants are being phased out. As a consequence, the installation of open-space and utility scale solar energy (USSE) plants has been promoted in the last years. Given that such solar PV installations often have a larger land-use footprint than other power plants (Trainor et al., 2016), the deployment of solar PV increasingly competes for limited land resources. This is particularly pronounced in regions like Switzerland, where land resources are limited and the landscape awareness is high (Huber et al., 2017). The current political discussion in Switzerland about open-space and utility scale solar ener...
While poverty has continued to persist, policy makers have implemented a range of anti-poverty transfer programs. Various strands of economic and psychological literature have documented both intended and unintended effects of anti-poverty transfers, including increased feelings of inferiority. This study extends the literature by examining how anti-poverty transfers may lead to such feelings of inferiority and hence also to lower investments. First, we develop a theoretical model in which individuals internalize signals from transfers. We predict that recipients of targeted transfers will negatively update their beliefs about their returns to investments and therefore reduce investments, compared to similar recipients of universal transfers. Next, we will test the model’s predictions w...
We study professionals’ motivations for providing information on a job's time demands to jobseekers. To do so, we conduct a survey experiment in which professionals are asked to provide information about their former employer to a hypothetical jobseeker. We randomize the characteristics (gender, desire to have children) of the jobseeker, the availability of information about jobseekers' preferences for information, and the recruitment motives of the professional. We will test how these conditions affect the professionals' time allocation among various topics.
We experimentally examine how the selection process of public officials (POs) impacts their corrupt activities via a fostered sense of entitlement. We propose that entitlement effects vary with the selection method, with ability-based selections possibly height- ening corruption, while prosociality-based ones might mitigate it. Our experimental design entails a two-stage process where the first stage involves an ability contest and a prosociality contest. The second stage is a bribery game where citizens in each group compete for a prize and can bribe the PO in charge. We control the sense of enti- tlement and its source by whether or not announcing which contest determines the appointment of POs. We analyze how various selection methods shape bribery and corruption through the lens of s...
This study investigates beliefs about signal interpretation in the labor market. In particular it aims at discovering inequities in information of optimal signals through an online sender receiver experiment to mimic real life job applications and hiring decisions.
We study how shifting the weight placed on different hiring criteria in an applicant recommendation algorithm shifts hiring and post-hiring outcomes for applicants and firms, using a field experiment on a large online jobs platform.