Field Experiment In India Research Articles

Decentralized Targeting of Agricultural Credit Programs: Private Versus Political Intermediaries

Abstract We conduct a field experiment in India comparing two ways of delegating selection of microcredit clients among smallholder farmers to local intermediaries: a private trader (TRAIL), versus a local–government appointee (GRAIL). Selected beneficiaries in both schemes were equally likely to take up and repay loans, and experienced similar increases in borrowing and farm output. However farm profits increased and unit costs of production decreased significantly only in TRAIL. While there is some evidence of superior selection by ability and landholding in TRAIL, the results are mainly driven by greater reduction of unit production costs for TRAIL treated farmers than GRAIL treated farmers of similar ability or landholding. We develop and test a model where the TRAIL agents’ role as middlemen in the agricultural supply chain enabled and motivated them to offer treated farmers business advice, which helped them lower unit costs.

Entertainment-Education for Better Health: Insights from a Field Experiment in India

Entertainment-education has been touted as a potent delivery channel for health education campaigns. Yet, there is little evidence of its causal effects. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by using a field experiment in India to study two questions on the efficacy of health entertainment-education. First, can health entertainment-education, particularly through films that show role models and draw on emotions, lead to lasting, positive change in health knowledge and behavior? Second, can financial incentives for ex-post health literacy boost the effectiveness of health entertainment-education? The results show that health entertainment-education successfully increased health knowledge (e.g. knowledge about cleanliness and hygiene) by 16 percent. These gains persist almost one year later, although there were no observed impacts on health behaviors. Further, financial incentives do not appear to have any effects. These insights contribute to our knowledge of what works for health education in low-income settings, so that future education campaigns can be crafted with more meaningful impact.

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

Evaluating and Pricing Health Insurance in Lower-Income Countries: A Field Experiment in India

What works for water conservation? Evidence from a field experiment in India

In a randomized field experiment, we test whether training medium scale farmers in an agricultural water reduction practice reduces water use from common aquifers in Haryana, India. We find that training farmers in a water reduction technique, Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD), reduced pumping hours by 22% during peak pumping weeks without affecting their yields. In addition, we also incorporate the use of social comparison messages. We argue that farmers will adopt AWD despite flat fee tariffs if farmers own their pumps and if their crops can reach their varietal potential. This is because there are diminishing returns to irrigation and irrigation costs rise as water levels drop.

Evaluating the efficacy of demand-side communication interventions on claiming rights: evidence from an action research field experiment in India

AbstractCommunication-based interventions increasingly characterize attempts to strengthen policy implementation, especially policies targeting disadvantaged populations who despite their eligibility often fail to access potential benefits. However, factors that determine their effectiveness remains an open empirical question. To examine elements of effective communication in the exercising of rights, we designed and implemented a randomized field experiment around a public informational assistance campaign, spanning an entire urban district in India as part of a larger action research initiative. Situated within the context of India’s ambitious “Right to Education” Act, our intensive campaign employed distinct instruments varying in terms of trustworthiness, expertise, and media richness—frontline public health workers, trained student volunteers, and an interactive voice response system—to assist individuals in the claiming process. While our results reiterate the value of information, we find these effects to be less pronounced for the most disadvantaged. Our results also emphasize the role of expertise in navigating complex administrative processes. However, our analysis points to the necessity of complementing communication-based interventions with other supply-side enabling measures that ensure they aid the most disadvantaged.

NGOs and the Effectiveness of Interventions

Abstract Programs implemented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are often more effective than comparable efforts by other actors, yet relatively little is known about how implementer identity drives final outcomes. By combining a stratified field experiment in India with a tripledifferences estimation strategy, we show that a local development NGO's prior engagement with target communities increases the effectiveness of a technology-promotion program implemented in these areas by at least 30 percent. This “NGO reputation effect” has implications for the generalizability and scalability of evidence from experimental research conducted with local implementation partners.

Subject Confusion and Task Non-Completion: Methodological Insights from an Artefactual Field Experiment in India

Subject Confusion and Task Non-Completion: Methodological Insights from an Artefactual Field Experiment in India

Gender inequality and caste: Field experimental evidence from India

Using a field experiment in India where patients are randomly assigned to rank among a set of physicians of the same gender but with different castes and years of experience, we show that the differences in patients’ physician choices are consistent with gender-based statistical discrimination. Labor market experience cannot easily overcome the discrimination that female doctors suffer. Further, we find that gender discrimination is greater for lower caste doctors, who typically suffer from caste discrimination. Given the increasing share of professionals from a lower caste background, our results suggest that the ‘intersectionality’ between gender and caste leads to increased gender inequality among professionals in India.

Educative Interventions to Combat Misinformation: Evidence from a Field Experiment in India

Misinformation makes democratic governance harder, especially in developing countries. Despite its real-world import, little is known about how to combat misinformation outside of the United States, particularly in places with low education, accelerating Internet access, and encrypted information sharing. This study uses a field experiment in India to test the efficacy of a pedagogical intervention on respondents’ ability to identify misinformation during the 2019 elections (N = 1,224). Treated respondents received hour-long in-person media literacy training in which enumerators discussed inoculation strategies, corrections, and the importance of verifying misinformation, all in a coherent learning module. Receiving this hour-long media literacy intervention did not significantly increase respondents’ ability to identify misinformation on average. However, treated respondents who support the ruling party became significantly less able to identify pro-attitudinal stories. These findings point to the resilience of misinformation in India and the presence of motivated reasoning in a traditionally nonideological party system.

Stigma and misconceptions in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic: A field experiment in India

A hidden cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is the stigma associated with the disease for those infected and groups that are considered as more likely to be infected. This paper examines whether the provision of accurate and focused information about COVID-19 from a reliable source can reduce stigmatization. We carry out a randomized field experiment in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, in which we provide an information brief about COVID-19 by phone to a random subsample of participants to address stigma and misconceptions. We find that the information brief decreases stigmatization of COVID-19 patients and certain groups such as religious minorities, lower-caste groups, and frontline workers (healthcare, police), and reduces the belief that infection cases are more prevalent among certain marginalized social and economic groups (Muslims, low caste, rural-poor population). We provide suggestive evidence that improved knowledge about the prevention and transmission of COVID-19 and reduced stress about the disease are important channels for the reduction in stigmatization.

Stigma and Misconceptions in the Time of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Field Experiment in India

A hidden cost of the COVID-19 pandemic is the stigma associated with the disease for those infected and groups that are considered as more likely to be infected. This paper examines whether the provision of accurate and focused information about COVID-19 from a reliable source can reduce stigmatization. We carry out a randomized field experiment in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India, in which we provide an information brief about COVID-19 by phone to a random subsample of participants to address stigma and misconceptions. We find that the information brief decreases stigmatization of COVID-19 patients and certain groups such as religious minorities, lower-caste groups, and frontline workers (healthcare, police), and reduces the belief that infection cases are more prevalent among certain marginalized social and economic groups (Muslims, low caste, rural-poor population). We provide suggestive evidence that improved knowledge about the prevention and transmission of COVID-19 and reduced stress about the disease are important channels for these effects.

Gender Inequality and Caste: Field Experimental Evidence from India

Using a field experiment in India where patients are randomly assigned to rank among a set of physicians of the same gender but with different castes and years of experience, we show that the differences in patients’ physician choices are consistent with gender-based statistical discrimination. Labor market experience cannot easily overcome the discrimination that female doctors suffer. Further, we find that gender discrimination is greater for lower caste doctors, who typically suffer from caste discrimination. Given the increasing share of professionals from a lower caste background, our results suggest that the 'intersectionality' between gender and caste leads to increased gender inequality among professionals in India.

Can Technology Mitigate the Impact of Heat on Labor Productivity? Experimental Evidence from India

This paper analyses the role of technology in reducing heat-induced labor productivity losses. For this, we use a field experiment in India which randomized the use of productivity-augmenting digital mode versus classic paper-and-pen mode for conducting 2000 household surveys. Combining this experimentally induced variation in survey mode with day-to-day variation in temperature, we estimate the impact of survey mode on surveyor productivity as temperature rises. We find that as temperature rises and working conditions start to deteriorate, using digital-mode results in 5 percent higher surveyor-productivity compared to paper surveys. These relative productivity gains are mainly concentrated in extremely hot days - where the adverse impact of heat is likely at its peak. Further analysis shows that these impacts are not driven by differences in effort of surveyors or differences in the characteristics of respondents, thereby pointing to the role of technology in reducing the adverse effects of heat.

What Works for Water Conservation? Evidence from a Field Experiment in India

What Works for Water Conservation? Evidence from a Field Experiment in India

Do Politicians Discriminate Against Internal Migrants? Evidence from Nationwide Field Experiments in India

AbstractRural‐to‐urban migration is reshaping the economic and social landscape of the Global South. Yet migrants often struggle to integrate into cities. We conduct countrywide audit experiments in India to test whether urban politicians discriminate against internal migrants in providing constituency services. Signaling that a citizen is a city newcomer, as opposed to a long‐term resident, causes incumbent politicians to be significantly less likely to respond to requests for help. Standard “nativist” concerns do not appear to explain this representation gap. We theorize that migrants are structurally disposed to participate in destination‐area elections at lower rates than long‐term residents. Knowing this, reelection‐minded politicians decline to cater to migrant interests. Follow‐up experiments support the hypothesis. We expect our findings to generalize to fast‐urbanizing democracies, with implications for international immigration too. Policywise, mitigating migrants’ de facto disenfranchisement should improve their welfare.

Feedback spillovers across tasks, self-confidence and competitiveness

Does feedback on success in a task increase individuals' beliefs about their chance to succeed in a subsequent, unrelated, task? Does feedback on failure have a symmetric effect? Is the distortion of beliefs, possibly due to motivated beliefs, mistakes in updating or the feeling of having a lucky day, heterogeneous across individuals, in particular according to their status in the society? Conducting an artefactual field experiment in India with participants from different castes, we show that feedback on success in a forced competition in a first task increases winners' self-confidence and competitiveness in the subsequent task. Such feedback spillovers on self-confidence are asymmetric and heterogeneous according to status and more likely for already more confident individuals.

The causal mechanism of financial education: Evidence from mediation analysis

This paper uses a field experiment in India and mediation analysis to investigate the causal mechanisms between financial education and financial behavior. Focusing on the mediating role of financial literacy, we propose a broader definition of financial knowledge that includes three dimensions: numeracy skills, financial awareness, and attitudes towards personal finance. We then employ causal mediation analysis to investigate the proportion of the treatment effect that can be attributed to these three channels. Strikingly, we find that numeracy does not mediate any effects of financial education on financial outcomes. For simple financial actions such as budgeting, both awareness and attitudes serve as pathways, while for more complex financial activities such as opening a savings account, attitudes play a more prominent role—though these patterns appear to be sensitive to confounding. We also compare our mediation analysis results to other empirical techniques that have been typically used to study mechanisms, and we discuss how mediation analysis differs from these approaches.