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During mid January until end of February 2023 we will conduct an online experiment in Indonesia that studies which factors (attributes) respondent's link to person's likelihood to engage in criminal activities.

The treatment experiment was included in a web survey of German health workers. Health workers were randomly assigned to one of five groups. One group was the control group that did not receive an information treatment, whereas the remaining groups received one of four different information treatments before being asked about their vaccine recommendations for each of six different vaccines. Participants were recruited via Ads on Facebook and Instagram and did not receive an incentive for their participation.

Poor teacher accountability leads to poor education quality, especially in remotely-located schools that are costly to supervise. This paper reports the impacts of three interventions that linked community-based monitoring to a government allowance for teachers working in remote areas in Indonesia. In all treatments, the project helped communities to formulate a joint commitment between schools and community members to improve education. Teacher-specific scorecards were developed based on this commitment and performance was evaluated and disseminated by a newly-formed user committee. Treatments 2 and 3 added a pay for performance scheme that relied on the community reports. In Treatment 2 (SAM+Cam), the remote area allowance was made dependent on teacher presence, which was monitored with a camera with a time stamp. In Treatment 3 (SAM+Score), the overall score on the scorecard determined the allowance. We find improvements in learning outcomes across all treatments; however, the strongest impacts of between 0.17-0.20 standard deviation (s.d.) were observed for SAM+Cam. In this treatment, teachers increased teaching hours and parents increased investments in their children’s education. We show evidence that bargaining and the community’s propensity to punish free-riders may have a role in affecting treatment effectiveness.

Remote schools in developing countries are costly to supervise, resulting in low teacher accountability and poor education outcomes. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of three treatments that introduced teacher incentives based on community monitoring of teacher effort against locally agreed standards. The Social Accountability Mechanism (SAM) treatment facilitated a joint commitment between schools and community members to improve learning. Teacher performance was rated against it, discussed in monthly public meetings and passed on to authorities. The second and third treatments combined SAM with a performance pay mechanism that would penalize eligible teachers’ remote area allowance for poor performance. In the SAM+Camera (SAM+Cam) treatment, the cut was based on absence as recorded by a tamper-proof camera; while in the SAM+Score treatment, it was based on the overall rating. After one year, the findings indicate improvements in learning outcomes across all treatments; however, the strongest impact of 0.20 standard deviation is observed for SAM+Cam. The evaluation also finds a small positive impact on the effort of affected teachers for SAM+Cam and SAM, and significant positive improvements on parental educational investments in all treatments. For SAM and SAM+Cam, additional data were collected in the second year (one year after project facilitators left). The findings show that SAM+Cam’s impacts on learning outcomes and parental investments—but not teacher effort —persisted into the second year.

Skills trainings that target individuals or small businesses feature prominently in the development assistance landscape. They are an important vehicle for both bilateral and multilateral economic support. One estimate puts the volume of skills training interventions facilitated by the World Bank alone at about a billion U.S. dollars per year (Blattman and Ralston 2015). This briefing serves to summarize key insights that have so far been generated in the related research literature, identify study gaps that remain, discuss core challenges that compelling impact evaluations must grapple with, and outline one such set of evaluations that is planned to accompany Invest for Jobs. (...) Projektbericht für das Bundesministerium für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung

Health professionals can make an important contribution to increasing COVID-19 vaccination uptake through their opinions and recommendations. The extent to which health professionals recommend COVID-19 vaccination, which vaccine they prefer, and the extent to which their vaccination recommendations are influenced by public debates has not yet been explored in detail. To shed light on these questions, we implemented an information processing experiment in an online survey. The results suggest that the sometimes controversial debate surrounding AstraZeneca influence vaccine recommendations. Because the efficient implementation of a vaccination campaign depends on the acceptance of different vaccines, the AstraZeneca controversy may have slowed vaccination progress in Germany., Gesundheitsfachkräfte können mit ihren Meinungen und Empfehlungen einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erhöhung der COVID-19 Impfbereitschaft leisten. Inwiefern Gesundheitsfachkräfte COVID-19 Impfungen empfehlen, welchen Impfstoff sie präferieren und inwieweit ihre Impfempfehlungen von öffentlichen Debatten beeinflusst werden, wurde bislang nicht näher erforscht. Um Licht auf diese Fragen zu werfen, haben wir ein Experiment zur Informationsverarbeitung in einer Online-Befragung implementiert. Die Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass die teils kontroversen Debatten um AstraZeneca die Impfstoffempfehlungen erheblich beeinflussen. Da die effiziente Umsetzung einer Impfkampagne davon abhängt, dass die Menschen verschiedene Impfstoffe akzeptieren, könnte die Kontroverse um AstraZeneca den Impffortschritt in Deutschland verlangsamt haben., GESIS Blog

Teacher evaluations are conducted to inform employment decisions and teacher professional development with the ultimate goal to create beneficial student learning environments. The effectiveness and feasibility of teacher evaluations, particularly in high-stakes contexts (hiring, firing, promotion, pay-for-performance schemes), crucially depends on the support these evaluations receive from the various education stakeholders involved. While many governments around the world, including the Government of Indonesia, are interested in reforming and expanding their current teacher evaluation systems, often little is known about how principals, teachers, parents, and students perceive these evaluations. This paper uses data from a recent large-scale opinion survey in Indonesia to examine and provide rare insights into the attitudes of key education stakeholders towards teacher performance evaluations. Four key insights are identified. First, many principals and teachers agree with existing evaluation schemes employed in Indonesia, such as the teacher competence test (ujian kompetensi guru (UKG)) and the teacher performance evaluation (penilaian kinerja guru (PKG)) and are also open to reforms and the introduction of new schemes. Second, pay-for-performance schemes are generally popular among principals and teachers, and preferred over seniority-linked pay systems. Third, teachers in urban areas are more favorable towards pay-for-performance schemes than teachers in semi-urban areas. Finally, all stakeholders generally support the concept of principals, teachers, and parents fulfilling performance evaluator roles.

This paper looks at individual risk behavior and disability in Vietnam, where many households live with a disabled family member. Due to the Vietnam war, disability is a common phenomenon and shapes individuals' daily life and decision making. Using longitudinal data of 2200 households in Vietnam and an instrumental variable strategy, we show that individuals who live with a disabled family member are more risk averse than others. In addition we employ field experiments and psychological primes to elicit risk and loss behavior of individuals living in the Vietnam province Ha-Thinh. The experimental results, underpin our panel results. We show in addition that a negative recollection of health issues, leads to a lower risk attitude of individuals who do not live with a disabled family member and that individuals who live with a disabled family member are less loss averse. Our findings are causal and contribute to existing studies showing that households who are characterized by higher backward risks are more risk averse than others.