Partisan identity shapes social, mental, economic, and physical life. Using a novel dataset, we study the consequences of partisan identity by examining the immediate impact of electoral loss and victory on happiness and sadness. Employing a quasi-experimental regression discontinuity model we...

A randomized experiment (N = 3,037) examines the impact of conditional and unconditional monetary incentives on response rates to a mail survey in a contemporary context. This is the first large sample study in 10 years to examine the effect of monetary incentives on survey response. Providing...

We document three remarkable features of the Opower program, in which social comparison- based home energy reports are repeatedly mailed to more than six million households nationwide. First, initial reports cause high-frequency "action and backsliding," but these cycles attenuate over time....

We conduct a field experiment to understand how the strategies organizations use to implement new technologies affect their adoption and efficacy. Specifically, we show that the standard strategy schools use to introduce a text message alert system for parents — online signup — induces...

Attendance in kindergarten and elementary school robustly predicts student outcomes. Despite this well-documented association, there is little experimental research on how to reduce absenteeism in the early grades. This paper presents results from a randomized field experiment in ten school...

A field experiment examines how enrollment defaults affect the take-up and impact of an education technology (N=6,976). It shows that a standard (high-friction) opt-in process induces extremely low parent take-up (1%), while a simplified process yields higher take-up (11%), but both fail to...

It is common for organizations to offer awards to motivate individual behavior, yet few empirical studies evaluate their effectiveness in the field. We report a randomized field experiment (N = 15,329) that tests the impact of two common types of symbolic awards: pre-announced awards...