Field Experiments

1. Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces and Policing: Experimental Evidence from Urban India (with Sofia Amaral, Girija Borker, Nathan Fiala, Anjani Kumar, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi)

Partners & Donors: World Bank, JPAL CVI, IFMR, Princeton University, ifo Institute, Hyderabad City Police

Location: Telangana, India

2. Debiasing Law Enforcement Officers: Evidence from an Expressive Arts Intervention in India (with Sofia Amaral, Girija Borker, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi)

Partners & Donors: International Growth Center, C3, Princeton University, IFMR, ifo Institute, Bihar Police

Location: Bihar, India

3. Building Strong Foundations: Large‑Scale Early Childhood Human Capital Formation in Nepal (with Lindsey Buck, Rachel Cohen, Nathan Fiala, Mridul Mishra, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Deepak Saraswat)

Partners & Donors: World Bank, and Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Nepal)

Location: Nepal

4. Wheels of Change: Transforming Girl's Lives with Bicycles (with Nathan Fiala, Ana Garcia-Hernandez, and Kritika Narula)

Partners & Donors: World Bicycle Relief, UBS Optimus Foundation, Ministry of General Education (Zambia), IPA (Zambia), and University of Connecticut

Location: Zambia

5. When Goal Setting Forges Ahead but Stops Short (with Asadul Islam, Sungoh Kwon, Eema Masood, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Deepak Saraswat)

Partners & Donors: World Bank, and Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (Zanzibar)

Location: Zanzibar

6. Understanding Behavioral Barriers to Demand for Domestic Violence Service (with Sofia Amaral, Lindsey Buck, and Maria Micaela Sviatschi)

Partners & Donors: Princeton University

Location: USA

AEA RCT Registry

AEA RCT Registry

  • How can gender-based violence (GBV) be prevented? Can increased quantity and quality of police presence help curb GBV? What works in improving victim’s engagement with police services? This project aims to answer these questions through a novel policing program in Hyderabad, India. The Safety, Health and Environment (SHE Teams) Program is a hotspots street police patrolling intervention aimed at addressing and deterring GBV. The researchers and Hyderabad City Police have jointly developed a research program that will evaluate the effect of this program. We aim to test the role of increased police presence through patrolling and policing visibility (i.e. uniformed vs. undercover officers). Our research will address fundamental questions in the economics of crime and gender.

  • How to prevent gender-based violence (GBV) and address institutional service-delivery related to GBV is not well understood. Our project aims to study one potential solution to address GBV in India – the role of policing quality. Our goal is to showcase the effect of a novel policing program in the Indian state of Bihar where the government led a training program for police officers on legal information, soft and technical skills regarding the handling of GBV crimes. The policy is innovative and the first micro-level program of its kind in the state. It reflects the urgent need to improve policing for GBV through improved service-delivery to victims and by raising awareness and sensitivity about these forms of crime.

Results

  • A large body of literature has found that early childhood interventions have effects on later outcomes in life such as lifetime earnings (Cunha and Heckman 2008), language, cognitive, and emotional skills (Chinen and Bos 2016), and participation in crime and other risky behaviors (Heckman and Masterov 2004). However, the extent to which these impacts last and through what channels they occur is not understood. We aim to study a large-scale intervention in Nepal on teacher, parent, and child outcomes. Using randomization into a treatment that provides teacher and parental training on how to encourage cognitive, physical, linguistic, emotional, and social development in children, we will study outcomes for children, teachers, and parents across 200 ECD schools. We will track children’s long-term development outcomes, as well as changes in teacher and parental investments, knowledge, and practices. We will use this information in order to determine the mechanisms through which children grow and develop, as well as the effectiveness of early childhood interventions in both the short term and the long term.

  • We study the impact of a program that provides a bicycle to a school-going girl who lives more than 3km from school. We randomized whether a girl receives a bicycle with a small cost to her family to cover replacement parts, a bicycle where these costs are covered by the program and so is zero cost to the family, or a control group. We find that the bicycle reduced average commuting time to school by 35%, decreased absenteeism by 27%, improved math test scores and led to girls expressing higher feelings of control over their lives. We also find evidence that girls who received bicycles with the small cost to her family had higher levels of aspirations, self-image and a desire to delay marriage and pregnancy, possibly due to the girls perceiving the payment from the family as a desire to increase future investment in her. We do not find any impacts on school dropout and grade transition. Heterogeneity analysis by distance to school shows an inverted u-shape for most of the schooling and empowerment results, suggesting that impacts are greatest for girls that live far, but not too far, from school. This also suggests that empowerment outcomes worked through schooling effects.

AEA RCT Registry

Results

  • We conduct an at-scale randomized control trial among 18,000 secondary students in Zanzibar (Tanzania) to examine the effects of personal best goal-setting on student outcomes. We also test the impact of combining goal setting with non-financial rewards conditional on students meeting the goals they set. We find that goal-setting has a significant positive impact on student time use, study effort, and self-discipline. However, we do not find any significant impacts on test scores. This is partially because nearly two-thirds of students do not set realistic goals. We find that effects on time use, study effort, and discipline are weaker when goal-setting is combined with non-financial rewards. This suggests that tying goal-setting to extrinsic incentives could weaken its impact. We also find stronger impacts for female students, and from students coming from weaker socio-economic backgrounds. These results demonstrate that goal-setting can have positive impacts on student outcomes, especially for the relatively disadvantaged. However, for maximizing impacts goal-setting may need to be combined with guidance on setting realistic goals and extrinsic rewards tied to goals may need to be avoided.

Results

  • Rates of domestic violence (DV) are increasing rapidly in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. What are the barriers that victims of DV face in reporting and leaving abusive relationships? How can policymakers eliminate the obstacles that victims face? This project aims to answer these questions through a novel intervention that targets information constraints, belief updating, and victim self-blaming. We use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to survey a set of 8000 women and look at common barriers that women face when in an abusive relationship; we then provide treatments that give victims access to resources for reporting, information about the health status of their relationships, and videos that break down self-blame and encourage self-esteem building. Our research attempts to analyze what the most important barriers are for victims of domestic violence, and how they can reduce self-blaming, increase emotional and psychological wellbeing, and ultimately report or leave abusive relationships.