Researchers worked with the City of Rochester and local social service providers to evaluate the Bridges to Success program, in which participants were paired with mentors who helped them move towards economic self-sufficiency.

Researchers conducted two randomized evaluations to test the impacts of providing customized information on predicted case outcomes or conciliation services on labor court settlement rates in Mexico. Both interventions nearly doubled the immediate settlement rate, but only when the plaintiff was there to personally receive the information, and evidence suggests that the interventions increased payments to workers.

A researcher partnered with the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, a consortium formed by US multinational companies, to evaluate the impact of privately enforcing local labor laws on garment factories in Bangladesh. Enforcing the legally-required creation and operation of workplace safety committees increased factories’ compliance with the labor law and some measures of factory safety, without reducing factory efficiency. These effects persisted in the long run and were stronger among factories with good managerial practices.

In partnership with a rural district in Eastern Uganda, researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation to study whether rewarding top-performing teachers with a future posting of their choice incentivizes teachers to improve their attendance and the quality of their teaching.

Employers often rely on subjective performance evaluations by supervisors to gauge the performance of workers–particularly in the public sector, where civil servants’ work performance is hard to measure. However, relying on the opinions of local supervisors could cause subordinates to prioritize pleasing their supervisors rather than focusing on productive tasks and work responsibilities. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation testing the impact of two alternative subjective performance evaluation schemes on subordinates’ work performance.

In Pakistan, researchers are evaluating the impact of using mobile phones to directly connect politicians with voters and give voters the opportunity to provide real-time feedback to their elected representatives.

Researchers will investigate whether mobilizing local political leaders to strengthen the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizens’ willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and ultimately revitalize the social compact.

Uninformed elected leaders or voters can negatively affect political accountability, such as decision-making on what and how public services are delivered to citizens. The researcher partnered with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party in Lahore to evaluate the demand and responsiveness of local politicians to information about their citizens’ preferences.

In partnership with the Provincial Government of Kasaï-Central in the Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation during the 2018 property tax collection campaign to test the impact of lower property tax rates and stronger tax enforcement on revenue collection. Reducing property tax rates from current levels increased government revenue due to higher tax compliance.

Researchers are employing an RCT to evaluate whether the establishment of police station-level Women’s Help Desks (WHDs), as well as the deployment of additional female personnel to these WHDs, improves the responsiveness of frontline officers to women, as well as levels of crime and crime reporting.

Researchers use a large-scale RCT to evaluate a program aimed to improve cohesion between Syrian refugees and their host communities in Jordan.

Researchers evaluated whether giving traditional birth attendants (TBAs) cash incentives for maternal postnatal referrals can increase uptake of skilled maternal postnatal care. Cash rewards increased referrals made by TBAs by 182 percent and more than tripled the proportion of clients that attended postnatal care. However, clients of incentivized TBAs were still much less likely to receive postnatal care compared to mothers delivering in a health facility, suggesting that other potential barriers may prevent women from seeking and accessing care.

To better understand how to measure and report depression, researchers randomized the order of questions in a national survey to examine the effect of triggering memories of difficult events, such as conflicts, shocks, and death, on reported levels of depression across households in Nigeria. They found that having his/her painful memories triggered, respondents who experienced an adverse event were more likely to report symptoms of depression.

Researchers evaluated the effects of an information campaign on workers’ awareness of and participation in a program that subsidizes skills-building training in Germany. Results showed that the information campaign doubled workers’ awareness of the program on average, but had no effects on program take-up or on labor market outcomes one to two years later. However, the campaign was successful in encouraging participation in other non-subsidized training services among workers aged below 45 years old.

The researcher conducted a randomization in rural Odisha in India, by comparing adoption of a new seed variety through farmer-to-farmer networks in one half as benchmarked by door-to-door sales of the same seed. Trading between farmers leads to substantial under-adoption of agricultural technology relative to the door-to-door sales. Diffusion is partially but not fully explained by social networks.