Issue 3 – Special Issue on Field Experiments

Garrett A. Johnson
Online display advertising is a hostile medium for field experiments. Display-ad effects are tiny and necessitate large-scale experiments.

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.

Jan Sauermann
Do reciprocal workers have higher returns to employer-sponsored training? 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.

Felipe A. Dunsch, David K. Evans, Ezinne Eze-Ajoku, 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.

Heinrich Hock, Dara Lee Luca, Tim Kautz, 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.