Issue 2

Volume 32 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Summer 2023

How to examine external validity within an experiment

Amanda E. Kowalski
A fundamental concern for researchers who analyze and design experiments is that the estimate obtained from the experiment might not be externally valid for other policies of interest. Researchers often attempt to assess external validity by comparing data from an experiment to external data. In this paper, I discuss approaches from the treatment effects literature that researchers can use to begin the examination of external validity internally, within the data from a single experiment.

Dangers of a double-bottom line? A poverty targeting experiment misses both targets

Dean Karlan, Adam Osman, and Jonathan Zinman
Two for-profit Philippine banks, aiming to increasing microlending to the poor, incorporated a widely used poverty measurement tool into their loan applications and tested the tool using randomized training content. The strategy backfired, leading to no additional poor applicants and potentially lower-performing loans. This cautionary tale is an example of why management may want include social outcomes directly into employee performance evaluations, or silo corporate social responsibility efforts from core operations.

Infringing use as a path to legal consumption: Evidence from a field experiment

Hong Luo and Julie Holland Mortimer
Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. Our results suggest that ex-post monetization (e.g., licensing after use) may expand the market, and that rights holders can create value by minimizing search and transactions costs.

Worker reciprocity and the returns to training: Evidence from a field experiment

Jan Sauermann
Using a field experiment with random assignment to training combined with survey information on workers' reciprocal inclinations, the results show that reciprocal workers reciprocate employers' training investments by higher posttraining performance. This finding provides an alternative rationale to explain firm training investments even with the risk of poaching.

Performance feedback in a group contest: A field experiment on electricity conservation

Chia-Wen Chen, Josie I. Chen, and Min-Jen Lin
We conduct a field experiment on electricity conservation to study whether revealing both the competitive state and the social state in a group contest affects individual beliefs and efforts. We find that contestants without feedback about relative performance had difficulty assessing their group's competitive status, and laggards within a group tended to be overconfident about their relative contribution.

Management, supervision, and healthcare: A field experiment

Felipe A. Dunsch, David K. Evans, Ezinne Eze-Ajoku, and Mario Macis
We used a randomized management consulting intervention with 80 public-sector healthcare facilities in Nigeria to study the role of information, training, and supervision on the adoption of improved organizational practices.

Evaluating entrepreneurship training: How important are field experiments for estimating impacts?

Robert W. Fairlie
Governments and donors around the world spend billions of dollars subsidizing entrepreneurship training programs. Unbiased evaluation estimates are paramount to understanding whether subsidies and investments in these programs are justified. The goal of this paper is to compare nonexperimental to experimental methods for evaluating the effectiveness of entrepreneurship training programs that provide training in management, marketing, accounting, legal, and other aspects of starting and running businesses.

Improving the outcomes of youth with medical limitations: Evidence from the National Job Corps Study

Heinrich Hock, Dara Lee Luca, Tim Kautz, and David Stapleton
Improving work outcomes for youth with disabilities and reducing their reliance on disability benefits are important policy priorities, but existing interventions have shown limited promise. We provide new evidence to inform this discussion by re-analyzing data from the 1990s National Job Corps Study, a randomized field experiment conducted nationwide in the United States.

Wikipedia matters

Marit Hinnosaar, Toomas Hinnosaar, Michael Kummer, and Olga Slivko
We document a causal impact of online user-generated information on real-world economic outcomes. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment to test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists' choices of overnight visits.