Social Norm Tax Letters
The Dominican Tax Authority randomly assigned businesses to receive letters comparing their tax compliance to similar firms. The social norm…
Public Experiment Registry
A knowledge base of real policy experiments — randomized trials and rigorous evaluations run by governments, municipalities, universities, and civic institutions. Every record includes the question, design, effect size, and decision taken. Null and negative results are included. That is the point.
110
Total experiments
91
Positive results
5
Null results
21
Countries represented
The Dominican Tax Authority randomly assigned businesses to receive letters comparing their tax compliance to similar firms. The social norm…
Reducing the administrative friction of paying a tax penalty had a larger effect than deterrence messaging alone. The billing code in the si…
Reframing a tax bill as evidence of public goods produced—not a government demand—increased payment among delinquents. The effect was amplif…
Among 12 message variants tested, simply including the debtor's name in an SMS dramatically increased repayment. Including the exact amount …
Most eligible seniors did not enroll in SNAP despite qualifying. An information letter tripled enrollment relative to do-nothing. Adding act…
Reducing enrollment to a single checkbox—rather than requiring a multi-step application—had the largest effect of any communication tested. …
SNAP requires an in-person or phone interview before approval. Letting applicants choose when and how that interview happens—rather than rec…
Telling households how their energy use compared to similar neighbors—and providing a simple smiley face showing whether they were above or …
Simply making green energy the starting position—requiring households to actively switch away rather than actively choose it—increased adopt…
The Opower-style neighbor comparison design applied to water produced a larger proportional effect than in energy (5% vs. 2%), likely becaus…
Project STAR is one of the largest and most-cited education RCTs ever conducted. Students randomly placed in small classes outperformed peer…
Providing free breakfast in schools before the school day produced measurable gains in academic attainment equivalent to two additional mont…
Chicago's fine elimination produced an immediate surge in returned materials as patrons with long-outstanding items resolved their accounts.…
Counterintuitively, removing the financial penalty for late returns improved return rates, not worsened them. Patrons who had avoided the li…
The largest cluster-randomized trial of community masking ever conducted found that free mask distribution alone had little effect, but pair…
A statewide RCT with 700,000 participants found that SMS nudges had vanishingly small effects on COVID vaccination. The absolute difference …
Framing a vaccine appointment as already belonging to the patient ('your dose is reserved') outperformed both no contact and a standard remi…
Pooling 22 randomized trials, SMS reminders for childhood vaccination produced an 11% relative increase in coverage. The effect is smaller t…
The first RCT of a park-based physical activity intervention in the US. Parks randomly assigned to have structured community advisory boards…
Among households at similar risk of foreclosure, those facing simplified application processes received help at dramatically higher rates—an…
Moving permit applications online—eliminating the requirement to appear in person during office hours, fill out paper forms, and return for …
Philadelphia tested three message frames for prompting rental license renewal. All outperformed the control, but the frame emphasizing what …
State election agencies randomly selected eligible non-registrants to receive postcards explaining how to register. Treatment recipients reg…
UK local authorities and an advocacy organization independently ran RCTs testing SMS voter registration reminders. Both found positive effec…
Moving to Opportunity is one of the most consequential policy RCTs ever conducted. The initial evaluation found limited short-term economic …
For decades, the dominant assumption in policing was that more patrol cars on streets reduced crime and made residents feel safer. This land…
Of the 12 message variants tested, the single most effective element was including the loan officer's name rather than the borrower's name—a…
A Dutch financial regulator partnered with a buy-now-pay-later provider to test whether pre-due-date SMS reminders reduced late fees. They d…
The Perry Preschool Project is the most influential early childhood intervention study in existence. Followed for over 40 years, children ra…
David Olds designed one of the most replicated social intervention experiments in history. Nurses visiting low-income first-time mothers dur…
The Jamaica study is remarkable for its long follow-up and the specificity of its finding: psychosocial stimulation (play, reading, structur…
PROGRESA is the most influential anti-poverty experiment in modern policy history. Its village-level randomization allowed clean causal iden…
GiveDirectly's Kenya experiment directly challenged the assumption that poor people cannot be trusted with unrestricted cash. Recipients inv…
New York adapted PROGRESA for a US urban context. The program reduced poverty significantly while payments were active, increased health cov…
Rather than spreading patrol thinly across precincts, hot spots policing concentrates resources at the tiny fraction of locations responsibl…
While car patrol studies (including Kansas City) showed limited crime effects, this experiment tested a different form: officers on foot in …
Body-worn cameras had been widely adopted based on small observational studies suggesting they reduced complaints and use of force. The DC e…
The RAND HIE is the most important health insurance experiment ever conducted. The core finding—that free care increases use by 30% with no …
Oregon's random Medicaid lottery created a rare natural experiment in a domain where RCTs are normally impossible. Gaining coverage dramatic…
At Home/Chez Soi is the largest Housing First RCT ever conducted. The standard model of homeless services required people to demonstrate sob…
London's congestion charge was the first large-scale urban road pricing experiment in a Western democracy. The £5 daily fee produced an imme…
The 5p bag charge produced one of the most dramatic behavior changes measured in modern environmental policy. A near-trivial cost completely…
Colombia's Familias en Acción provided one of the cleanest tests of the conditional cash transfer model outside Mexico. The municipality-lev…
India's Midday Meal Scheme became the largest school feeding program in the world. The staggered state rollout created a natural experiment …
This study addressed a fundamental debate in development economics: does charging even a small price for a health product increase recipient…
The BRAC Graduation Programme tackled a structural gap in anti-poverty programs: existing approaches didn't reach the ultra-poor, who lacked…
The Head Start Impact Study is one of the most politically contentious education evaluations in US history. Children gained meaningfully dur…
Cure Violence treats gun violence as a contagious disease, using credible messengers to interrupt transmission before shootings cascade. The…
Chicago's analysis of its inclusionary zoning ordinance found that the affordable unit requirement, combined with density bonuses that allow…
The Columbus evaluation added to a growing body of evidence that placing homeless individuals directly into permanent housing — with short-t…
The Arnold Foundation's Public Safety Assessment provides judges with algorithmic flight risk and new-crime risk scores to inform bail decis…
The BAM evaluation found that a school-based cognitive behavioral therapy program reduced violent crime arrests among at-risk youth by 44% i…
New York's ban the box policy produced the double-edged result that audit studies had predicted: it improved some outcomes for people with r…
The University of Washington study of Seattle's minimum wage increase found a counterintuitive result: average earnings for low-wage workers…
The MDRC evaluation of Year Up, using random assignment created by program oversubscription, found one of the largest sustained earnings eff…
The EITC expansion of 1993 constitutes one of the most studied natural experiments in labor economics. Researchers using difference-in-diffe…
Nest's change of the default investment option for 10 million UK workers to a responsible investment fund is perhaps the largest-scale appli…
British Columbia's carbon tax is frequently cited as the strongest real-world evidence that carbon pricing reduces emissions without depress…
The Yale/LBNL study documented strong peer effects in solar adoption — neighbors who can see solar panels on nearby rooftops are significant…
The 30-city urban tree equity program systematically documented what urban foresters have long believed but rarely measured at scale: target…
Oregon's Motor Voter (AVR) system registered 272,000 previously unregistered citizens in its first year, disproportionately young and lower-…
The NHS/BIT experiment demonstrated that a simple personalized SMS reminder reduced appointment non-attendance by 26%. The mechanism combine…
Phoenix's concurrent permit review pilot tested whether the sequential review process — in which zoning, building, and fire reviews happen o…
The ideas42/NYC experiment found that most failure-to-appear events for low-level summons are driven by forgetting rather than intent to eva…
Stockholm's congestion pricing trial is the gold standard for evaluating road pricing. The 7-month trial produced an immediate 22% reduction…
Bogotá's TransMilenio transformed one of the world's most congested cities by replacing a chaotic private bus network with a structured, ded…
The London bikeshare health study used a matched cohort design to estimate that regular users of the Santander Cycles scheme experienced a 4…
The M-Pesa study used geographic variation in agent rollout as an instrument for mobile money access, finding meaningful consumption gains —…
The Equity Bank Kenya commitment savings experiment found that farmers who were offered accounts where they could restrict their own withdra…
The CFPB financial coaching trial found meaningful improvements in credit scores, savings balances, and bill payment behavior at 12 months, …
The clean cookstove experiment produced a sobering null result despite high initial enthusiasm. Although households adopted the stoves when …
The chlorine dispenser experiment found that placing chlorine at the point of collection — removing the step of transporting it home — raise…
Banerjee and Duflo's vaccination study found that a reliable, predictable schedule alone nearly tripled immunization rates, and adding a sma…
The Compartamos microcredit evaluation was one of seven coordinated randomized evaluations of microcredit conducted under J-PAL auspices. To…
The Kenya deworming study found that mass treatment with a cheap, safe drug increased school participation substantially — and that the effe…
The VSLA evaluation tested whether communities can create their own financial infrastructure without external capital injection. They can — …
Vermont's SNAP simplification demonstrated that the administrative burden of applying for food assistance was itself a barrier to enrollment…
Rhode Island's Medicaid renewal reminder experiment addressed one of the most common causes of coverage gaps: members who are still eligible…
Finland's basic income experiment was the first national-level RCT of unconditional cash for unemployed adults in a high-income country. The…
The Stockton SEED experiment was the first randomized evaluation of a guaranteed income in a mid-sized American city. The most counterintuit…
The UK's Sure Start evaluation used a regression discontinuity design based on geographic deprivation cutoffs to estimate causal effects on …
Seattle's Preschool Program produced one of the few lottery-based RCTs of a universal municipal pre-K program in the United States. The lott…
The BAM experiment is unusual in simultaneously reducing violent crime and improving schooling outcomes through a low-cost, school-based int…
The Denver experiment tested the Housing First model — giving chronically homeless individuals permanent housing without behavioral prerequi…
The Philadelphia eviction representation experiment exposed a structural asymmetry in housing court: landlords routinely appeared with attor…
The Chicago STAR experiment tested whether a college promise — information about guaranteed tuition-free access combined with advising — cou…
Rwanda's health performance-based financing experiment was one of the first rigorous RCTs of pay-for-performance in a low-income country hea…
The South Africa Child Support Grant is one of the most thoroughly studied small-value cash transfer programs in the world. The regression d…
Ethiopia's Productive Safety Net Programme is one of the largest social protection programs in sub-Saharan Africa and among the most thoroug…
Boston's school zone speed camera experiment directly tested the most common objection to automated enforcement: that it reduces violations …
The UK Troubled Families Programme is one of the most important null results in British social policy. The government had claimed that 99% o…
The Los Angeles VITA experiment demonstrated that proximity and scheduling, not awareness, were the binding constraints on free tax preparat…
The Swachh Bharat Mission is one of the largest public health infrastructure programs in history, and its evaluation illustrates the differe…
Brazil's Bolsa Família is the world's largest conditional cash transfer programme and one of the most studied. The regression discontinuity …
The Minneapolis foot patrol experiment was designed partly to test whether the Kansas City and Philadelphia results generalized to a third c…
The Michigan social pressure experiment produced the largest voter mobilization effect ever documented in a randomized study — 8.1 percentag…
Oregon's vote-by-mail system converts the act of voting from a public event requiring travel and coordination to a private, at-home activity…
The New Haven canvassing experiment established one of the most durable findings in political science: personal contact substantially increa…
Save More Tomorrow is one of the most consequential behavioral economics experiments ever conducted. The core insight: present bias makes it…
Year Up is one of the few job training programs with a lottery-based RCT showing sustained, large earnings effects. The 30% earnings increas…
The JTPA evaluation is one of the most important experiments in US social policy — not because it confirmed what worked, but because it docu…
The IMPACT trial is the landmark experiment in collaborative care for depression — a model that integrates mental health treatment into prim…
The Boston Ceasefire experiment is the foundational study in focused deterrence — a violence reduction strategy that combines a credible enf…
HOPE Probation inverted the conventional logic of deterrence. Standard probation supervision is infrequent and lenient for most violations, …
The One Summer Plus experiment produced one of the most surprising findings in criminology: a low-cost summer jobs program reduced violent c…
The Career Academies evaluation is one of the longest-running randomized studies in US education policy. Eight years after expected graduati…
The BBBS national impact study is the most rigorous evaluation of one-to-one community mentoring ever conducted. Across 8 agencies in 8 citi…
Porto Alegre's participatory budgeting experiment is the most widely replicated governance innovation of the late 20th century. Beginning wi…
The Seguro Popular evaluation used a randomized cluster design — rare in large-scale health insurance research — to test whether extending i…
The NYPL summer reading experiment is one of the clearest demonstrations of the attention deficit problem in public programming: most childr…
The registry grows as institutions experiment and publish. If you have run a civic experiment with measurable outcomes, we want it here — including null results.