AEA RCT Registry

Field	Before	After
Last Published	September 30, 2019 01:37 PM	October 22, 2024 03:30 AM
Study Withdrawn		No
Intervention Completion Date		September 15, 2015
Data Collection Complete		Yes
Final Sample Size: Number of Clusters (Unit of Randomization)		3,059 households across 175 village
Was attrition correlated with treatment status?		No
Final Sample Size: Total Number of Observations		5,842 individual decisions
Final Sample Size (or Number of Clusters) by Treatment Arms		5,842 individual decisions
Public Data URL		https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/suppl/10.1086/720466
Is there a restricted access data set available on request?		Yes
Restricted Data Contact		[email protected]
Program Files		Yes
Program Files URL		https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/suppl/10.1086/720466
Data Collection Completion Date		September 15, 2015
Is data available for public use?		Yes
Keyword(s)	Other	Other
Building on Existing Work		Yes

Field	Before	After
Paper Abstract		We investigate the link between poverty and decision-making in a sample of farmers in Zambia, who were given the opportunity to exchange randomly assigned household items for alternative items of similar value. Analyzing a total of 5,842 trading decisions and leveraging multiple sources of variation in financial constraints, we show that exchange asymmetries decrease in magnitude when participants are more constrained. This result is robust to experimental procedures and is not mediated by changes in cognitive performance. Consistent with the interpretation that scarcity leads to more rational decisions by increasing the utility loss from forgone trading, we show that trading probabilities go up when the market value of the items is exogenously increased.
Paper Citation		Poor and Rational: Decision-Making under Scarcity Dietmar Fehr, Günther Fink, and B. Kelsey Jack Journal of Political Economy 2022 130:11, 2862-2897
Paper URL		https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/720466

Fields Changed