In 2008, Uganda granted hundreds of small groups $400/person to help members start individual skilled trades. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised earnings by 38% (Blattman, Fiala, Martinez 2014). We return after 9 years to find these start-up grants raised earnings and...

This paper examines weight loss and the formation of healthy habits through cash rewards in the context of a multi-phase randomized controlled trial involving 700 obese individuals. We find effects of monetary incentives for weight loss of up to EUR 300 on body weight during all experimental...

Communication is well known to increase cooperation rates in social dilemma situations, but the exact mechanisms behind this have been questioned and discussed. This study examines the impact of communication on public good provisioning in an artefactual field experiment conducted with 216...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular behavioral interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), primarily providing consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback...

Many policy interventions in the environmental sector aim at changing environmental preferences, because these provide the basis for adopting environmental conservation behavior or technologies. To evaluate these changes, standard measurement tools in survey-based impact evaluations have their...

We complement the empirical evidence on the sustainability of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the first time, rigorously examine the potential of cash rewards to prevent weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled trial, about 700 obese persons were first assigned...

We complement the empirical evidence on the sustainability of weight loss achieved through cash rewards and, for the first time, rigorously examine the potential of cash rewards to prevent weight cycling. In a three period randomized controlled trial, about 700 obese persons were first assigned...

Deforestation and burning of forest products to meet cooking needs massively contribute to global warming. In order to reduce the biomass fuel consumption of households in developing countries, various improved cookstove (ICS) interventions were implemented by governments, NGOs, and other...

We study the effect of unemployment on cognitive abilities among individuals aged between 50 and 65 in Europe. To this end, we exploit plant closures and use flexible event-study estimations together with an experimentally elicited measure of fluid intelligence, namely word recall. We find that,...

Climate change can be addressed by mitigation and adaptation approaches at the national policy level. Since only limited resources are available for both strategies, it is key to unravel how ongoing climate developments and their communication influence the population's preferences regarding the...