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- All HBS Web (407)
- Faculty Publications (152)
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- 2017
- Working Paper
Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France
By: Vincent Pons
This paper provides the first estimate of the effect of door-to-door canvassing on actual electoral outcomes, via a countrywide experiment embedded in François Hollande's campaign in the 2012 French presidential election. While existing experiments randomized... View Details
Pons, Vincent. "Will a Five-Minute Discussion Change Your Mind? A Countrywide Experiment on Voter Choice in France." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 16-079, January 2016. (American Economic Review (forthcoming).)
- Article
Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber
Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized... View Details
Fetzer, Thiemo, and Thomas Graeber. "Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 33 (August 17, 2021): 1–4.
- March 2020
- Article
A Revolution in Economics? It's Just Getting Started...
By: Shawn A. Cole, William Pariente and Anja Sautmann
We have each experienced thrills and pain while supporting the mission of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which facilitated many of the experiments described in the 2019 Nobel Prize citation. J-PAL in many ways seeks to fulfill what Angrist and Pischke... View Details
Cole, Shawn A., William Pariente, and Anja Sautmann. "A Revolution in Economics? It's Just Getting Started..." Art. 104849. World Development 127 (March 2020).
- Article
Savings in Transnational Households: A Field Experiment Among Migrants from El Salvador
By: Nava Ashraf, Diego Aycinena, Claudia Martinez A. and Dean Yang
While remittance flows to developing countries are very large, it is unknown whether migrants desire more control over how remittances are used. This research uses a randomized field experiment to investigate the importance of migrant control over the use of... View Details
Keywords: Migration; Remittances; Intrahousehold Allocation; Savings; Saving; Residency; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry; El Salvador; United States
Ashraf, Nava, Diego Aycinena, Claudia Martinez A., and Dean Yang. "Savings in Transnational Households: A Field Experiment Among Migrants from El Salvador." Review of Economics and Statistics 97, no. 2 (May 2015): 332–351.
- January 2024
- Article
Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the PROGRESA Experiment
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Theresa Molina, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation – resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment – to identify the... View Details
Adhvaryu, Achyuta, Theresa Molina, Anant Nyshadham, and Jorge Tamayo. "Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the PROGRESA Experiment." Economic Journal 134, no. 657 (January 2024): 1–22.
- 2014
- Working Paper
Savings in Transnational Households: A Field Experiment Among Migrants from El Salvador
By: Nava Ashraf, Diego Aycinena, Claudia Martinez A. and Dean Yang
While remittance flows to developing countries are very large, it is unknown whether migrants desire more control over how remittances are used. This research uses a randomized field experiment to investigate the importance of migrant control over the use of... View Details
Keywords: Migration; Remittances; Intrahousehold Allocation; Savings; Immigration; Diasporas; International Finance; El Salvador
Ashraf, Nava, Diego Aycinena, Claudia Martinez A., and Dean Yang. "Savings in Transnational Households: A Field Experiment Among Migrants from El Salvador." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 20024, March 2014. (Review of Economics and Statistics, accepted.)
- 2013
- Working Paper
How Does Risk Management Influence Production Decisions? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Shawn Cole, Xavier Gine and James Vickery
Weather is a key source of income risk, particularly in emerging market economies. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial involving a sample of Indian farmers to study how an innovative rainfall insurance product affects production decisions. We find that... View Details
Keywords: Risk Management; Production; Weather; Insurance; Emerging Markets; Agribusiness; Insurance Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; India
Cole, Shawn, Xavier Gine, and James Vickery. "How Does Risk Management Influence Production Decisions? Evidence from a Field Experiment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 13-080, March 2013. (Revised September 2014.)
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment
By: John Beshears, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook and Neil Stewart
Does automatic enrollment into retirement saving increase household debt? We study the randomized roll-out of automatic enrollment pensions to ~160,000 employers in the United Kingdom with 2-29 employees. We find that the additional savings generated through automatic... View Details
Keywords: Retirement; Saving; Personal Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Credit; Compensation and Benefits
Beshears, John, Matthew Blakstad, James J. Choi, Christopher Firth, John Gathergood, David Laibson, Richard Notley, Jesal D. Sheth, Will Sandbrook, and Neil Stewart. "Does Pension Automatic Enrollment Increase Debt? Evidence from a Large-Scale Natural Experiment." Working Paper, October 2024.
- Article
Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)
By: Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli
An inherent risk of algorithmic personalization is disproportionate targeting of individuals from certain groups (or demographic characteristics such as gender or race), even when the decision maker does not intend to discriminate based on those “protected”... View Details
Keywords: Algorithm Bias; Personalization; Targeting; Generalized Random Forests (GRF); Discrimination; Customization and Personalization; Decision Making; Fairness; Mathematical Methods
Ascarza, Eva, and Ayelet Israeli. "Eliminating Unintended Bias in Personalized Policies Using Bias-Eliminating Adapted Trees (BEAT)." e2115126119. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 11 (March 8, 2022).
- 25 Mar 2021
- Research & Ideas
Steer Clear of the Blind Spots That Derail Experiments
look at how companies could more effectively leverage structured, randomized experiments to inform decision-making. His goal: Enable C-suite leaders to avoid the blind spots and blunders that can occur when... View Details
Keywords: by Danielle Kost
- April 2020
- Article
A Theory of Experimenters: Robustness, Randomization, and Balance
By: Abhijit Banerjee, Sylvain Chassang, Sergio Montero and Erik Snowberg
This paper studies the problem of experiment design by an ambiguity-averse decisionmaker who trades off subjective expected performance against robust performance guarantees. This framework accounts for real-world experimenters’ preference for randomization. It also... View Details
Banerjee, Abhijit, Sylvain Chassang, Sergio Montero, and Erik Snowberg. "A Theory of Experimenters: Robustness, Randomization, and Balance." American Economic Review 110, no. 4 (April 2020): 1206–1230.
- 2018
- Working Paper
Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment
By: Jason Acimovic, Chris Parker, David F. Drake and Karthik Balasubramanian
When workers make operational decisions, the firm's global knowledge and the workers’ domain-specific knowledge complement each other. Oftentimes workers have the final decision-making power. Two key decisions a firm makes when designing systems to support these... View Details
Keywords: Employees; Decision Making; Training; Performance Improvement; Money; Mobile Technology; Developing Countries and Economies; Financial Services Industry
Acimovic, Jason, Chris Parker, David F. Drake, and Karthik Balasubramanian. "Show or Tell? Improving Agent Decision Making in a Tanzanian Mobile Money Field Experiment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-106, May 2018.
- Article
Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation and Endurance of Network Ties
By: Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning
Can managers influence the formation of organizational networks? In this article, we evaluate the effect of joint tasks on the creation of network ties with data from a novel field experiment with 112 aspiring entrepreneurs. During the study, we randomized individuals... View Details
Keywords: Accelerators; Entrepreneur; Social Networks; Field Experiment; Entrepreneurship; Organizational Design; Networks; Social and Collaborative Networks; Social Media; Information Technology Industry; India
Hasan, Sharique, and Rembrand Koning. "Designing Social Networks: Joint Tasks and the Formation and Endurance of Network Ties." Art. 4. Journal of Organization Design 9 (2020).
- 2025
- Working Paper
Evaluations Amid Measurement Error: Determining the Optimal Timing for Workplace Interventions
By: Matthew DosSantos DiSorbo, Iavor I. Bojinov and Fiammetta Menchetti
Researchers have embraced factorial experiments to simultaneously evaluate multiple treatments, each with different levels. Typically, in large-scale factorial experiments, the primary objective is identifying the treatment with the largest causal effect, especially... View Details
Keywords: Factorial Designs; Fisher Randomizations; Rank Estimators; Employer Interventions; Causal Inference; Mathematical Methods; Performance Improvement
DosSantos DiSorbo, Matthew, Iavor I. Bojinov, and Fiammetta Menchetti. "Evaluations Amid Measurement Error: Determining the Optimal Timing for Workplace Interventions." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 24-075, June 2024. (Revised May 2025.)
- April 2023
- Article
Performance on Patient Experience Measures of Former Chief Medical Residents as Physician Exemplars Chosen by the Profession
By: Lucy Chen and J. Michael McWilliams
OBJECTIVE To compare care for patients of primary care physicians (PCPs) who were former chiefs with care for patients of nonchief PCPs.
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Using 2010 to 2018 Medicare Fee-For-Service Consumer Assessment of Healthcare... View Details
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Using 2010 to 2018 Medicare Fee-For-Service Consumer Assessment of Healthcare... View Details
Keywords: Performance Evaluation; Forecasting and Prediction; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Competency and Skills; Surveys; Health Industry
Chen, Lucy, and J. Michael McWilliams. "Performance on Patient Experience Measures of Former Chief Medical Residents as Physician Exemplars Chosen by the Profession." JAMA Internal Medicine 183, no. 4 (April 2023): 350–359.
- Article
Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns
By: Eva Ascarza, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer and Matthew Danielson
Customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns have traditionally focused on maximizing the profitability of the targeted customers. The authors demonstrate that in business settings characterized by network externalities, a CRM campaign that is aimed at changing the... View Details
Keywords: Social Effects; Field Experiment; Mobile; Customer Relationship Management; Network Effects; Consumer Behavior
Ascarza, Eva, Peter Ebbes, Oded Netzer, and Matthew Danielson. "Beyond the Target Customer: Social Effects in CRM Campaigns." Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) 54, no. 3 (June 2017): 347–363.
- February 2021
- Tutorial
Assessing Prediction Accuracy of Machine Learning Models
By: Michael Toffel and Natalie Epstein
This video describes how to assess the accuracy of machine learning prediction models, primarily in the context of machine learning models that predict binary outcomes, such as logistic regression, random forest, or nearest neighbor models. After introducing and... View Details
- June 2022 (Revised January 2025)
- Technical Note
Causal Inference
By: Iavor I Bojinov, Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton
This note provides an overview of causal inference for an introductory data science course. First, the note discusses observational studies and confounding variables. Next the note describes how randomized experiments can be used to account for the effect of... View Details
Keywords: Causal Inference; Causality; Experiment; Experimental Design; Data Science; Analytics and Data Science
Bojinov, Iavor I., Michael Parzen, and Paul Hamilton. "Causal Inference." Harvard Business School Technical Note 622-111, June 2022. (Revised January 2025.)
- November 2009
- Article
Finding Missing Markets (and a Disturbing Epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya
By: Nava Ashraf, Xavier Gine and Dean Karlan
Farmers may grow crops for local consumption despite more profitable export options. DrumNet, a Kenyan NGO that helps small farmers adopt and market export crops, conducted a randomized trial to evaluate its impact. DrumNet services increased production of export crops... View Details
Keywords: Export Crop; Field Experiment; Food Safety Standards; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Trade; Profit; Marketing; Standards; Failure; Non-Governmental Organizations; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Kenya; European Union
Ashraf, Nava, Xavier Gine, and Dean Karlan. "Finding Missing Markets (and a Disturbing Epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 91, no. 4 (November 2009): 973–990.
- 2023
- Working Paper
Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy
By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman and Benjamin Iverson
In a randomized control trial (RCT) with U.S. small businesses, we document that a large share of firms are not well-informed about bankruptcy. Many assume that bankruptcy necessarily entails the death of a business and do not know about Chapter 11 bankruptcy, where... View Details
Bernstein, Shai Benjamin, Emanuele Colonnelli, Mitchell Hoffman, and Benjamin Iverson. "Life After Death: A Field Experiment with Small Businesses on Information Frictions, Stigma, and Bankruptcy." NBER Working Paper Series, No. 30933, February 2023.