Why studies should be conducted on a larger scale

VoxDevTalk

Published 10.10.18

Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus argue that when we test things at a small scale, they might not be predictive of how they perform at a larger scale

Audio file

Randomised field experiments are rapidly becoming the benchmark for rigorous evaluations of public policy, with their use having increased exponentially over the past 15 years. However, there are many critics of this method within and outside the field of development economics. In this interview, Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus argue that experimental evaluations could have a greater impact on policy if more of them were (literally) bigger.