Extended unpaid vacation time

Last registered on April 06, 2026
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Extended unpaid vacation time
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0018268
Initial registration date
April 01, 2026

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
April 06, 2026, 8:02 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
Nicholas Bloom
Affiliation
Stanford
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Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Linxi (Cindy) Zeng
PI Affiliation
Stanford University
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Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2026-04-15
End date
2028-10-31
Keywords
Firms & Productivity, Labor
Additional Keywords
4 day week
JEL code(s)
J0
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
We collaborate with Trip.com to pilot a "Flexible Personal Leave" policy within the firm: Employees may optionally apply for additional unpaid personal leave without providing specific justification, subject to completed work handover (unpaid leave, benefits unchanged, pilot cap: 45 days/year per person). Trip wants to introduce this as they believes it will attract employees and improve retention as many employees will find this extremely valuable. We aim to assess the take-up and effects of this policy, in particular, how take-up varies across demographics, employee seniority and position, etc., and how the policy affects worker productivity and promotion, firm recruitment and retention, etc.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Bloom, Nicholas and Linxi (Cindy) Zeng. 2026. "Extended unpaid vacation time." AEA RCT Registry. April 06. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.18268-1.0
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Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Trip is randomizing in an A/B test offering employees up to 45 days of additional unpaid leave within a 12 month time frame. There are some constraints on this, particularly managers being OK that work is not suffering, but otherwise it should be allowed. Employees can take 1 day a week or perhaps a couple of longer breaks. Data on employee performance, retention, recruitment, promotions and surveys will be collected and analyzed.
Intervention Start Date
2026-05-01
Intervention End Date
2027-04-30

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
policy take-up, worker and management perception of policy, worker productivity and promotion, firm recruitment and retention, and survey data
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
6,000 employees at Trip.com will be asked to complete a survey gauging their interest in the flexible personal leave policy. Employees are then randomized into two groups by odd/even birthdays, and the winning group gets the option to take flexible personal leave as specified while the losing group does not (they remain as now - they have regular company leave, national holidays etc. but not additional option for extra unpaid leave). The firm will pilot this for a year (May 1, 2026-April 30, 2027). After the trial, we will compare the treated and control groups' policy take-up, worker and management perception of policy, worker productivity and promotion, recruitment and retention. We hope to evaluate this over the next 12+ months (in an earlier WFH experiment with Trip we collected 18 months of follow-up data).
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
Employees are randomized into two groups by odd or even birthdays. Trip.com's former founding CEO and current Chairman James Liang or another authority figure will publicly draw a ball to determine whether odd or even birthdays are treated, so everyone can see it is fair and random.
Randomization Unit
Individual employee
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
About 6000 Individual employees - Trip are leading the experiment and we believe they are including all the employees of four divisions.
Sample size: planned number of observations
About 6000 Individual employees.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
3000 employees treated (able to take flexible personal leave), 3000 employees control (not able to take flexible personal leave).
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Power calculations assume individual-level randomization with no clustering, two-sided tests at the 5% significance level, and 80% power. With 6,000 employees equally split between treatment and control (3,000 per arm), the study is powered to detect a minimum effect of approximately 0.07 standard deviations for continuous outcomes. For binary outcomes, the minimum detectable effect ranges from about 2.4 to 3.6 percentage points depending on the control-group mean. For survey-based outcomes, the detectable effect will be larger to the extent that endline response is below 100%; for example, with 70% response, the MDE for continuous outcomes is approximately 0.086 standard deviations.
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Effects of flexible personal leave in the workplace
IRB Approval Date
2026-05-01
IRB Approval Number
IRB00006208
Analysis Plan