Addressing the nation’s — and the world’s — biggest challenges will require learning and doing what works. A powerful tool for doing that is the randomized evaluation, also known as a randomized control trial (RCT). It is a tool that is increasingly being used in the U.S. and around the world. Well-designed and well-implemented RCTs can provide strong evidence about what works — not only whether a program works or not, but also which strategies within a program or policy work best.
As evaluation experts (including RCT proponents) will note, RCTs are one tool within public managers’ analytical tool boxes, along with performance measures, process evaluation, cost-benefit analysis or cost analysis, well-designed quasi-experiments and other approaches. The goal is to use the most rigorous method possible for the question at hand.
To learn more about the value of RCTs, as well as to address some of the concerns or criticisms of the approach, we are joined by Dean Karlan (@deankarlan), a leading expert in using randomized evaluations in social policy. He is a professor of economics at Yale University and the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a non-profit that has conducted over 500 evaluations in more than 50 countries to build evidence about effective solutions to global poverty problems. His most recent book, co-authored Jacob Appel, is titled, “More Than Good Intentions.”