TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ludwig,Jens
AU  - Kling,Jeffrey R.
AU  - Mullainathan,Sendhil
TI  - Mechanism Experiments and Policy Evaluations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17062
PY  - 2011
Y2  - May 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17062
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17062.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jens Ludwig
University of Chicago
1155 East 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/834-0811
Fax: 773/834-1582
E-Mail: jludwig@uchicago.edu

Jeffrey R. Kling
Congressional Budget Office
3403 Ordway St NW
Washington, DC 20016
E-Mail: jeffrey.r.kling@gmail.com

Sendhil Mullainathan
Department of Economics
Littauer M-18
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/496-2720
Fax: 617/495-7730
E-Mail: mullain@fas.harvard.edu
AB  - Randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies. How can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes? We argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions, what we call “mechanism experiments.” These types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested (or its setting) does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option.
ER  -