Measuring the effects of feedback from inspections on cleanliness in Swedish pre-schools - A field experiment

摘要

High hygienic standards are essential to avoid the spread of infectious diseases, not least in environments with many children. This paper uses an experimental design to examine the impact of feedback information following a public health safety inspection on future behavior of pre-schools in three Swedish municipalities. We find no effects of information at the municipality level. However, we find that pre-schools that were informed about a bad result improved more than comparable pre-schools that received no feedback. Conversely, informed pre-schools with a good result worsened their results compared to similarly performing uninformed pre-schools. Our results thus lend support to the so called “boomerang effect”.