Speaker:
Salvatore Di Falco
- London School of Economics
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
at
12:15 PM
Aula C, Palazzo di Economia
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in the social sciences are not double-blind, so participants know they are “treated” and will adjust their behavior accordingly. We implement a conventional economic RCT and a double-blind experiment in rural Tanzania (randomly allocating modern and traditional cowpea seed-varieties to farmers), and demonstrate that these effects can be large. For our case they explain the entire “treatment effect on the treated” as measured in a conventional economic RCT.
