Recent large-scale randomized experiments find that helping people form implementation intentions by asking when and where they plan to act increases one-time actions, such as vaccinations, preventative screenings and voting. We investigate the effect of a simple scalable planning intervention...

We estimate the impact of student loan “nudges” on community college students' borrowing and provide the first experimental evidence of the effect of student loans on educational attainment. Nonbinding loan offers listed in students' financial aid award letters, that do not alter students'...

We report the results of a field experiment where we exogenously vary the use of social comparisons "nudges" and subsidies for participation in an in-home energy audit program, and follow subjects through to the subsequent purchase of durable goods. We therefore can compare the causal effect of...

“Nudge”-style interventions are often deemed “successful” if they cause large behavior change, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the welfare effects of one especially...

Beginning in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed television advertisements to make major statements about a prescription drug, while referring to detailed drug information on the internet (FDA 1997; 2015). The hope was that consumers would seek additional information online to fully...

Can one-time informational interventions cause permanent changes in benefit take-up? In the context the Earned Income Tax Credit, we find evidence that reminding individuals of their eligibility has meaningful effects. Reminder notices have the largest effect among taxpayers without kids,...

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for various economic activities. To investigate the persistence of such interventions, we randomly assigned households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy...

We present a model of coarse thinking, in which individuals group situations into categories, and transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not. The model explains how uninformative messages can be persuasive,...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...

Childhood obesity around the world, and particularly in the United States, is an escalating problem that is especially detrimental as its effects carry on into adulthood. In this paper we employ the 1979 Child-Young Adult National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the 1997 National Longitudinal...