All three winners argue that using randomised control trials can lead to better public policy interventions.
New Delhi: The 2019 Nobel Prize for economics has been awarded to three economists who have focused on framing policies by first measuring the outcomes of alternative interventions on randomly chosen samples from a target population.
Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer have all worked on using this method to argue that randomised control trials (RCTs) can lead to better poverty reduction interventions.
The economics prize is officially called the ‘Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel’ was instituted in 1969.
Using randomised control trials in development economics
Before their use as a public policy research tool by the winners of this year’s economics Nobel, RCTs were largely used in medicine to test the effects of drugs. As Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer pointed out in a 2018 article, though, they weren’t the first to think about using RCTs to evaluate policies.
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