TY  - JOUR
AU  - Banerjee,Abhijit V.
AU  - Duflo,Esther
TI  - The Experimental Approach to Development Economics
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14467
PY  - 2008
Y2  - November 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14467
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14467.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Abhijit Banerjee
MIT
Department of Economics
E52-252d
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142-1347
Tel: 617/253-8855
Fax: 617/253-1330
E-Mail: banerjee@mit.edu

Esther Duflo
Department of Economics
MIT, E52-252G
50 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-7013
Fax: 617/253-6915
E-Mail: eduflo@mit.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -