Which Types of Experiments Are More Useful for Informing Public Policy?
In a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, former Visiting Scholar Jens Ludwig examines the value of experimental methods for informing policy. He and his co-authors -- RSF grantees Jeffrey R. Kling and Sendhil Mullainathan -- argue the debate has been narrowly framed as a choice between experimental and non-experimental methods. Instead, they say, more attention should be paid to "mechanism experiments". Here is the abstract:
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.
Read the full article, entitled "Mechanism Experiments and Policy Evaluations," here.