Esther Duflo and Randomized Controlled Trails

Author

Gang He

Published

April 13, 2024

Esther Duflo

  • 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics
  • Professor in Economics in MIT

RCTs

But Abhijit immediately understood the power of RCTs, not just as a tool to evaluate programs, but as a way of turning development economics on its head by giving us the freedom to put any theory to the test.

– Esther Duflo Biographical

Noteable RCTs

  • 1747 scurvy trial by James Lind (Tröhler 2005)
  • UK Medical Research Council’s (MRC) trial of patulin for common cold in 1943 (Clarke 2006)
  • The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

Why RCTs had so much impacts

  • Identification of causal effects (power of randomized)
  • External validity?
  • Observing unobservables
  • Data collection
  • Experiments

Read more: Esther Duflo

Thoughts for evaluation

  • Natural experiments
  • Causal identification strategies
  • Pros and cons of RCTs

Further readings

References

Clarke, Mike. 2006. “The 1944 Patulin Trial of the British Medical Research Council.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (9): 478–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/014107680609900923.
Tröhler, U. 2005. “Lind and Scurvy: 1747 to 1795.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 98 (11): 519–22. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1276007/.