Experimentation at scale

摘要

The growing use of randomized field experiments to evaluate public policies has been one of the most prominent trends in development economics in the past 15 years. These experiments have advanced our understanding within a broad range of topics including education, health, governance, finance (credit, savings, insurance), and social protection programs, as summarized in Duflo and Banerjee (2017). In this paper, we argue that experimental evaluations could have a greater impact on policy if more of them were (literally) bigger. We believe this for two reasons.