The CANDOUR Collaboration conducts global research on issues related to health, economics, and politics.  CANDOUR assembles a team of multi-disciplinary scholars exploring innovative experimental methods for addressing global policy challenges.  CANDOUR was initiated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Recent large-scale Random Control Trials have focused on promoting crop insurance in India, increasing vaccine uptake in North America and Africa, promoting financial literacy in the Global South and assessing the impact of corruption information campaigns in Latin America.  Study results have been published in leading scientific journals including Nature Medicine, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Health Economics, and PLOS Medicine.

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Featured Projects

Ghana Vaccine Incentive

We implemented a clustered randomized controlled trial with 6,963 residents in six rural Ghana districts to estimate the causal impact of financial incentives on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination uptake. Villages randomly received one of four video treatment arms: a placebo, a standard health message, a high cash incentive (60 Ghana cedis) and a low cash incentive (20 Ghana cedis). For the intention and the vaccination outcomes, the low cash incentive (20 Ghana cedis) had a larger positive effect on COVID-19 vaccine uptake than the high cash incentive (60 Ghana cedis).

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Citizens from 13 countries share similar preferences for COVID-19 vaccine allocation priorities

How does the public want a COVID-19 vaccine to be allocated? We conducted a conjoint experiment asking 15,536 adults in 13 countries to evaluate 248,576 profiles of potential vaccine recipients who varied randomly on five attributes. Our sample includes diverse countries from all continents. The results suggest that in addition to giving priority to health workers and to those at high risk, the public favors giving priority to a broad range of key workers and to those with lower income. These preferences are similar across respondents of different education levels, incomes, and political ideologies, as well as across most surveyed countries. The public favored COVID-19 vaccines being allocated solely via government programs but were highly polarized in some developed countries on whether taking a vaccine should be mandatory. There is a consensus among the public on many aspects of COVID-19 vaccination, which needs to be taken into account when developing and communicating rollout strategies.

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