In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This paper reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market...

Recent large-scale randomized experiments find that helping people form implementation intentions by asking when and where they plan to act increases one-time actions, such as vaccinations, preventative screenings and voting. We investigate the effect of a simple scalable planning intervention...

We estimate the impact of student loan "nudges" on community college students' borrowing and provide the first experimental evidence of the effect of student loans on educational attainment. Nonbinding loan offers listed in students' financial aid award letters, that do not alter students'...

"Nudge"-style interventions are often deemed "successful" if they cause large behavior change, but they are rarely subjected to full social welfare evaluations. We combine a field experiment with a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the welfare effects of one especially policy-relevant...

Firms and governments often use moral suasion and economic incentives to influence intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for various economic activities. To investigate the persistence of such interventions, we randomly assigned households to moral suasion and dynamic pricing that stimulate energy...

Can one-time informational interventions cause permanent changes in benefit take-up? In the context the Earned Income Tax Credit, we find evidence that reminding individuals of their eligibility has meaningful effects. Reminder notices have the largest effect among taxpayers without kids,...

We report the results of a field experiment where we exogenously vary the use of social comparisons "nudges" and subsidies for participation in an in-home energy audit program, and follow subjects through to the subsequent purchase of durable goods. We therefore can compare the causal effect of...

Beginning in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed television advertisements to make major statements about a prescription drug, while referring to detailed drug information on the internet (FDA 1997; 2015). The hope was that consumers would seek additional information online to fully...

With average temperature ranging from -20°C at the North Pole to 30°C at the Equator and with global warming expected to reach 1.4°C to 4.5°C by the year 2100, it is clear that climate change will have vastly different effects across the globe. Given the abundance of land in northern...