Christina Sarah Hauser

christinasarahhauser.com Welcome!

If you're interested in organ donation, public health and gender issues in LMICs, I’d love to discuss!

Check out my website for more information on my research:
sites.google.com/view/christi...

💰 Policy lesson: The intervention is cost-effective.

Alternative treatments are very expensive, much more than expanding the donor pool.

A low-cost, expert-led informational intervention can meaningfully shift behavior even in low-trust environments.

👥 Key finding #4: Peers amplify the effect.

Students who attended the session with their friends were more likely to register.

But we find no statistically significant spillovers to untreated peers.

The messenger — trusted experts — seems essential.

Gender heterogeneity results reinforce this finding:

Effects on donor registration are driven largely by men, who appear less constrained by family preferences than young women.

Any policy aiming to raise donor registration must take family dynamics seriously.

👨‍👩‍👧 Key finding #3: Families matter — a lot.

Students who expected their families to approve of organ donation were 7.4 pp more likely to register.

Among those expecting disapproval? Almost no effect.

In Tunisia, organ donation is not an individual but a family decision.

📚 Key finding #2: Knowledge and trust are the main mechanisms.

Treated students scored much higher on:

⚕️ Medical knowledge (+1.1 SD)
⚖️ Legal knowledge (+0.8 SD)
🏦 Institutional trust (+0.7 SD)

Correcting religious misperceptions also helped, though more modestly.

📈 Key finding #1: Information works.

11 students in treatment registered as donors, compared to 3 in control — donor sign-ups more than doubled.

This is a 1.8 percentage point increase (more than 250% increase) in a context where registration is extremely rare.

We measured knowledge, institutional trust, religious beliefs and behavior: whether students officially registered as donors.

In Tunisia, you do so by adding the word "donor" on your ID. We facilitated ID changes on campus, collaborating with the Technical Police.👮‍♂️👮‍♀️

The intervention (30 minutes, classroom randomization) had 3 parts:

🎥 A heart-transplant survivor’s video testimonial
👩‍⚕️ An expert-led session on medical, legal, and religious aspects
❓ A Q&A where students could voice doubts directly to the experts.

This raised the question: Can medical experts build trust, correct misconceptions, and increase donor registration?

To test this, we partnered with Tunisia’s National Center for the Promotion of Organ Transplantation to run an RCT with >1000 university students.

Policy reforms alone haven’t solved the problem. Tunisia adopted 'presumed consent' back in 1991.

But fearing public backlash, officials rely on family consent in practice — and refusal rates are high.

The result? A persistent shortage in the supply of organs for transplants.

In Tunisia, people often lack basic knowledge about organ donation and worry about organ trafficking or religious prohibitions.

But these fears are unfounded: Islam generally encourages organ donation.

So why is donor registration still so low?

🚨 Thousands die each year waiting for an organ transplant — not because of medical limitations, but because too few people sign up as donors.

My Job Market Paper asks whether trusted experts can shift beliefs and behavior in Tunisia.

Fostering Trust to Save Lives: Evidence from Organ Donation in Tunisia: Guest post by Christina Sarah Hauser

I am delighted to share that my job market paper was featured in the World Bank's Development Impact blog today: blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...

Summary below. 👇

Fostering Trust to Save Lives: Evidence from Organ Donation in Tunisia: Guest post by Christina Sarah Hauser

In today's JMP, @christinasarah.bsky.social tests an information intervention to boost organ donation in Tunisia. The work shows the role of building trust in medical institutions, and the importance of considering family and peer dynamics in this decision. blogs.worldbank.org/en/impacteva...