Exploring encouragement, treatment and spillover effects using principal stratification, with application to a field experiment on teens’ museum attendance

This paper revisits results from a field experiment, conducted in Florence, Italy, to study the effects of incentives provided to high school teens to motivate them to visit art museums. In the experiment, different classes of students were randomized to three types of encouragement and were offered a free visit to a main museum in the city. Using the principal stratification framework, the paper explores causal pathways that may lead students to increase future visits, as induced by the encouragement received, or by the individual experience of the proposed free museum visit, or by the spillover of classmates’ experience. We do so by estimating and interpreting the causal effects of the three forms of encouragement within the principal strata defined by compliance behaviors. Bayesian inferential methods are used to derive the posterior distributions of weakly identified causal parameters.

Journal of Business  & Economic Statistics, 2019