The Experimental Approach to Development Economics

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

No 14467, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Randomized experiments have become a popular tool in development economics research, and have been the subject of a number of criticisms. This paper reviews the recent literature, and discusses the strengths and limitations of this approach in theory and in practice. We argue that the main virtue of randomized experiments is that, due to the close collaboration between researchers and implementers, they allow the estimation of parameters that it would not otherwise be possible to evaluate. We discuss the concerns that have been raised regarding experiments, and generally conclude that while they are real, they are often not specific to experiments. We conclude by discussing the relationship between theory and experiments.

JEL-codes: O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp, nep-hpe and nep-lam
Note: ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (58)

Published as Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, 2009. "The Experimental Approach to Development Economics," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 151-178, 05.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14467.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Experimental Approach to Development Economics (2009)
Working Paper: The Experimental Approach to Development Economics (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14467

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14467

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().