IGL Trials Database

First, we will recruit people to provide advice on whether to invest in actual start-up firms and to provide a justification for their decision. We create pairs of advisors that provide the same recommendation but differ by race and gender. Next, we recruit participants for the role of investors. Each participant is endowed with one dollar for each of the four investment rounds. The adviser provides her/his assessment and investment recommendation. The investor then decides how much to invest, and the outcome is revealed.

We document interest in labor reallocation among small firm owners in Ghana; 60% and 41%, respectively, self-report willingness to hire or work for the average local firm owner. Firm owners also exhibit high willingness-to-pay for information on a random subset of hiring firms and jobseeking firm owners, during a Becker-Degroot-Marschak exercise. Conditionally random variation in access to this information generates immediate labor adjustments within and between firms, though rarely of firm owners themselves, and impacts firm closure 5-months post-intervention.

Effective managers play a vital role in successful teams by creating a positive and productive team environment, assigning tasks, setting clear goals and expectations, and facilitating communication and collaboration among team members. In this paper, we employ a distinctive experimental design to identify the marginal advantage of effective managers, and the specific attributes that yield the greatest benefits to team performance.

While evidence indicates that the notice and comment (N&C) process improves regulatory compliance by increasing trust in government, there is reason to doubt this mechanism’s viability in the digital realm. The lack of direct human interactions online can lead participating firms to feel unheard and unengaged. As a result, online N&C efforts can actually undermine firms’ views of the government’s regulatory authority and hamper efforts towards compliance.

Although entrepreneurship training programs are designed to help necessity entrepreneurs acquire skills and capabilities to take entrepreneurial action, participants in these programs often fail to do so. In partnership with a local government agency, we conducted a randomized field experiment involving 165 entrepreneurs in rural Tanzania where in addition to providing technical-skills training, approximately half of the participants also received “growth mindset” psychological training.

SMS-based business trainings are becoming a popular tool to remotely support microentrepreneurs in low-income settings due to their scalability and low costs. However, little evidence exists on the effectiveness of such trainings to improve business outcomes. In this study, I evaluate a field experiment in which access to an SMS-based training was randomized across 4,700 micro-entrepreneurs in Kenya. After three months, I find positive effects on knowledge and adoption of best practices.

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student economic outcomes up to three years after graduation. Using a randomized controlled trial, we evaluated a three-year intensive training for entrepreneurship teachers, finding pedagogical changes as intended and increased entrepreneurial activity among students.

Many school systems across the globe turned to online education during the COVID-19 pandemic. This context differs significantly from the prepandemic situation in which massive open online courses attracted large numbers of voluntary learners who struggled with completion. Students who are provided online courses by their high schools also have their behavior determined by actions of their teachers and school system.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises are particularly vulnerable to cyberattacks. A large-scale field experiment amongst SME employees showed that a phishing test is effective in the short term, but not in the medium or long term.

This experiment is listed in the BINN report "A wealth of behavioural insights - 2023 edition". Further information on the trial and authors may be available elsewhere.

India is host to 63 million Micro, Small and Medium scale Enterprises (MSMEs), contributing to a large share of employment, industrial output as well as high volume of emissions per unit of output. Therefore, adoption of energy efficient (EE) technologies by MSMEs is crucial in improving not only their competitiveness through cost reduction but also worker wellbeing and productivity through improvements in the work environment. Enterprise owners most often do not internalize the benefits of the latter; like productivity gains due to reduction in exposure of workers to heat, pollution etc.

The Ministry of Justice and Security developed a behavioural intervention aimed at inspiring individuals to adopt safe cyber practices: 'Valse email? Meld het via de meldknop' (Fake email? Report it using the report button). Thanks to this behavioural intervention, employees are ten times more likely to report suspicious emails internally. Moreover, click rates on links in suspicious emails have significantly decreased.

Early-stage researchers (ESRs - PhDs and Post-docs) are repeatedly touted as an untapped source of high-potential entrepreneurship. However, most entrepreneurship initiatives have either focused on undergraduate students or on consolidated scientists (PIs and professors). We argue that attempts to translate these initiatives to engage early-stage researchers (ESRs) are missing the positive impact of entrepreneurship beyond the direct commercialization of scientific outputs.

The public release of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked tremendous interest in how humans will use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accomplish a variety of tasks. In our study conducted with Boston Consulting Group, a global management consulting firm, we examine the performance implications of AI on realistic, complex, and knowledge-intensive tasks. The pre-registered experiment involved 758 consultants comprising about 7% of the individual contributor-level consultants at the company.

We conducted two randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate the impact of government-guaranteed loans offered by the Chilean and Colombian governments. The public funds of these programs greatly expanded following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and offered loans to Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises to mitigate the negative impact of the shock. Through a collaboration with private banks, we launched two experiments which offered loans to a sub-set of the 10,072 Chilean and 3,079 Colombian small businesses that took part in our experiments.