Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective
Presentations by Sir Angus Deaton, Agnès Labrousse, Jonathan Morduch, Lant Pritchett
Moderated by William Easterly
In October 2019, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer jointly won the 51st Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." But what is the exact scope of their experimental method, known as randomized control trials (RCTs)? Which sorts of questions are RCTs able to address and which do they fail to answer?
The first of its kind, Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A Critical Perspective addresses these questions, explaining how RCTs work, what they can achieve, why they sometimes fail, how they can be improved and why other methods are both useful and necessary.
Presentations:
“Randomized Control Trials in the Field of Development: A New Perspective on the Big Picture” by Lant Pritchett
“Thinking about Randomized Controlled Trials in Development Economics” by Sir Angus Deaton
“The Rhetorical Superiority of Poor Economics” by Agnès Labrousse
“The Disruptive Power of RCTs” by Jonathan Morduch
Purchase a copy of the book here.
About the Speakers:
Sir Angus Deaton is Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at USC. He is the author of The Great Escape: health, wealth, and the origins of inequality and, with Anne Case, Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. His interests span domestic and international issues and include health, happiness, development, poverty, inequality, and how to best collect and interpret evidence for policy. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He is a past President of the American Economic Association. His BA, MA, and PhD are from Cambridge University, and he holds several honorary doctorates from universities in Europe and the US. In 2015, he received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.” He was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was made a Knight Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List in 2016.
Agnès Labrousse is Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Picardie, France, and Associate Editor of the Régulation Review. She has been working on epistemology, the pharmaceutical industry, and development issues from an institutionalist perspective. Her work on RCTs bridges these areas of research and her article “Not by Technique Alone. Comparing Development Analysis with Elinor Ostrom and Esther Duflo” in the Journal of Institutional Economics received both the 2017 Ostrom Prize and the 2016 EAEPE Kapp-Prize.
Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University (NYU). His research focuses on poverty, in equality, and finance. He is the author with Rachel Schneider of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton 2017) and a co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009). Morduch has also co-written The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press 2010); and Economics (McGraw-Hill 2017, 2nd ed.). He is a founder and Executive Director of the NYU Financial Access Initiative.
Lant Pritchett is research director of the RISE project at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government and an associate of the Building State Capability project at Harvard Kennedy School. After a PhD in Economics in 1983 from MIT he worked with the World Bank from 1988 to 2007, living in Indonesia 1998–2000 and India 2004–2007. He taught at Harvard Kennedy School between 2000 and 2018. He has over a hundred publications (with over fifty different co-authors) on a wide range of development topics (education, economic growth, state capability, labor mobility, poverty, and learning from RCTs).
Moderator:
William Easterly, Professor of Economics at New York University (NYU), Co-director of NYU Development Research Institute (DRI)
Host:
Founded in 2006, the NYU Development Research Institute (DRI) is home to a growing team of researchers and students. Through our work, we seek to expand the number and diversity of serious commentators on the state of foreign aid and development. Our ultimate goal is to have a positive impact on the lives of the poor, who deserve the benefit of high-quality, clear-eyed, hard-headed economic research applied to the problems of world poverty.