This paper presents the results of a randomized experiment analyzing the use of vouchers for adult training. In 2006, 2,400 people were issued with a training voucher which they were entitled to use in payment for a training course of their choice. User behavior was compared with a control group...

Lifelong learning is often promoted in ageing societies, but little is known about its returns or governments' ability to advance it. This paper evaluates the effects of a large-scale randomized field experiment issuing vouchers for adult education in Switzerland. We find no significant average...

We empirically test the relationship between hiring discrimination and labour market tightness at the level of the occupation. To this end, we conduct a correspondence test in the youth labour market. In line with theoretical expectations, we find that, compared to natives, candidates with a...

Economists are increasingly turning to the experimental method as a means to estimate causal effects. By using randomization to identify key treatment effects, theories previously viewed as untestable are now scrutinized, efficacy of public policies are now more easily verified, and stakeholders...

A well-recognized problem in the multitasking literature is that workers might substantially reduce their effort on tasks that produce unobservable outputs as they seek the salient rewards to observable outputs. Since the theory related to multitasking is decades ahead of the empirical evidence,...

This paper presents evidence from a field experiment, which aims to identify the two sources of worker's pro-social motivation that have been considered in the literature: action-oriented altruism and output-oriented altruism. To this end we employ an experimental design that first measures the...

We run a large-scale natural field experiment to evaluate alternative strategies to enforce compliance with the law. The experiment varies the text of mailings sent to potential evaders of TV license fees. We find a strong alert effect of mailings, leading to a substantial increase in...

Credence goods are characterized by informational asymmetries between sellers and consumers that invite fraudulent behavior by sellers. This paper presents the results of a natural field experiment on taxi rides in Athens, Greece, set up to measure different types of fraud and to examine the...

We study risk attitudes, ambiguity attitudes, and time preferences of 661 children and adolescents, aged ten to eighteen years, in an incentivized experiment and relate experimental choices to field behavior. Experimental measures of impatience are found to be significant predictors of...

We ran a field experiment at a large Dutch school for intermediate vocational education to examine whether the response of teachers to student feedback depends on the content of the feedback. Students evaluated all teachers, but only a randomly selected group of teachers received feedback....