Nudge interventions have quickly expanded from academic studies to larger implementation in so‐called Nudge Units in governments. This provides an opportunity to compare interventions in research studies, versus at scale. We assemble a unique data set of 126 RCTs covering 23 million individuals, including all trials run by two of the largest Nudge Units in the United States. We compare these trials to a sample of nudge trials in academic journals from two recent meta‐analyses. In the Academic Journals papers, the average impact of a nudge is very large—an 8.7 percentage point take‐up effect, which is a 33.4% increase over the average control. In the Nudge Units sample, the average impact is still sizable and highly statistically significant, but smaller at 1.4 percentage points, an 8.0% increase. We document three dimensions which can account for the difference between these two estimates: (i) statistical power of the trials; (ii) characteristics of the interventions, such as topic area and behavioral channel; and (iii) selective publication. A meta‐analysis model incorporating these dimensions indicates that selective publication in the Academic Journals sample, exacerbated by low statistical power, explains about 70 percent of the difference in effect sizes between the two samples. Different nudge characteristics account for most of the residual difference.

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.