Many households in developing countries spend substantial amounts on lottery tickets but have only poor knowledge about the properties of the game and hold upwardly biased beliefs on the prospects of winning. To test whether more accurate knowledge reduces lottery participation, households in...

When properly implemented, Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) achieve a high degree of internal validity. Yet, if an RCT is to inform policy, it is critical to establish external validity. This paper systematically reviews all RCTs conducted in developing countries and published in leading...

In a field experiment, a large retail chain's CEO asked managers of treated stores “to do what they can” to reduce personnel turnover. Turnover decreases by a quarter for nine months; a reminder treatment triggers a similar decrease for a shorter period. Treated managers report shifting...

In the regression discontinuity design (RDD), it is common practice to asses the credibility of the design by testing whether the means of baseline covariates do not change at the cutoff (or threshold) of the running variable. This practice is partly motivated by the stronger implication derived...

This paper compares two prominent stochastic assignment mechanisms in the laboratory: Random serial dictatorship (RSD) and top trading cycles with random endowments (TTC). In standard theory, both mechanisms are strategy-proof and Pareto-effcient for the house allocation problem without...