We evaluate the impact of a health information intervention implemented through mobile phones, using a clustered randomized control trial augmented by qualitative interviews. The intervention aimed to improve sexual health knowledge and shift individuals towards safer sexual behavior by...

COVID-19 was a major shock to youth entrepreneurs and their businesses in Kenya. This paper studies the causal impact of grants - worth two months of baseline business revenue - and business development services as potential mitigation measures. Using multiple rounds of phone surveys up to seven...

Experimental economists believe (and enforce) that researchers should not employ deception in the design of experiments. The rule exists in order to protect a public good: the ability of other researchers to conduct experiments and have participants trust their instructions to be an accurate...

We evaluate the impact of a health information intervention implemented through mobile phones, using a clustered randomized control trial augmented by qualitative interviews. The intervention aimed to improve sexual health knowledge and shift individuals towards safer sexual behavior by...

Field experiments rely heavily on self-reported data, but subjects may misreport behaviors, especially sensitive ones such as crime. If treatment influences survey responses, it biases experimental estimates. We develop a validation technique that uses intensive qualitative work to assess survey...

We show that extremely poor, war-affected women in northern Uganda have high returns to a package of $150 cash, five days of business skills training, and ongoing supervision. 16 months after grants, participants doubled their microenterprise ownership and incomes, mainly from petty trading. We...

Several small, short-term, or non-experimental studies show that cognitive behavioral-informed trainings reduce antisocial behaviors for 1–2 years. But there is no large-scale, long-term research on persistence. We follow 999 high-risk men in Liberia 10 years after randomization into: 8 weeks...

Economic theory predicts that in a first-price auction with equal and observable valuations, bidders earn zero profits. Theory also predicts that if valuations are not common knowledge, then since it is weakly dominated to bid your valuation, bidders will bid less and earn positive profits....

Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for...

Evidence on the effectiveness of financial education and formal savings account access is lacking, particularly for youth. We randomly assign 250 youth clubs to receive either financial education, access to a cheap group account, or both. The financial education treatments increase financial...