IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/6722.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The method of randomization and the role of reasoned intuition

Author

Listed:
  • Basu, Kaushik

Abstract

The method of randomization has been a major driver in the recent rise to prominence of empirical development economics. It has helped uncover patterns and facts that had earlier escaped attention. But it has also given rise to debate and controversy. This paper evaluates the method of randomization and concludes that, while the method of randomization is the gold standard for description, and does uncover what is here called'circumstantial causality,'it is not able to demonstrate generalized causality. Nor does it, in itself, lead to policy conclusions, as is often claimed by its advocates. To get to policy conclusions requires combining the findings of randomized experiments with human intuition, which, being founded in evolution, has innate strengths. Moreover, even non-randomized empirical methods combined with reasoned intuition can help in crafting development policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Basu, Kaushik, 2013. "The method of randomization and the role of reasoned intuition," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6722, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6722
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2013/12/12/000158349_20131212090918/Rendered/PDF/WPS6722.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Angus Deaton, 2010. "Instruments, Randomization, and Learning about Development," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(2), pages 424-455, June.
    2. Cartwright,Nancy, 2007. "Hunting Causes and Using Them," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521860819.
    3. Angus Deaton, 2009. "Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development," Working Papers 1128, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
    4. Lakshmi Iyer & Anandi Mani & Prachi Mishra & Petia Topalova, 2012. "The Power of Political Voice: Women's Political Representation and Crime in India," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, American Economic Association, vol. 4(4), pages 165-193, October.
    5. James Habyarimana & William Jack, 2012. "State vs Consumer Regulation: An Evaluation of Two Road Safety Interventions in Kenya," NBER Working Papers 18378, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. James J. Heckman & Jeffrey A. Smith, 1995. "Assessing the Case for Social Experiments," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 9(2), pages 85-110, Spring.
    7. Chris Elbers & Jan Willem Gunning, 2014. "Evaluation of Development Programs: Randomized Controlled Trials or Regressions?," The World Bank Economic Review, World Bank, vol. 28(3), pages 432-445.
    8. Duflo, Esther & Glennerster, Rachel & Kremer, Michael, 2008. "Using Randomization in Development Economics Research: A Toolkit," Handbook of Development Economics, in: T. Paul Schultz & John A. Strauss (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 61, pages 3895-3962, Elsevier.
    9. Basu, Kaushik, 2003. "Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199261857, Decembrie.
    10. Nava Ashraf & Dean Karlan & Wesley Yin, 2006. "Tying Odysseus to the Mast: Evidence From a Commitment Savings Product in the Philippines," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 121(2), pages 635-672.
    11. Dollar, David & Kleineberg, Tatjana & Kraay, Aart, 2016. "Growth still is good for the poor," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 68-85.
    12. Rodrik, Dani, 2008. "The New Development Economics: We Shall Experiment, but How Shall We Learn?," Working Paper Series rwp08-055, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
    13. Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, 2009. "The Experimental Approach to Development Economics," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 151-178, May.
    14. Edward Miguel & Michael Kremer, 2004. "Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(1), pages 159-217, January.
    15. repec:pri:cheawb:deaton%20instruments%20of%20development%20keynes%20lecture%202009.pdf is not listed on IDEAS
    16. Christopher B. Barrett & Michael R. Carter, 2010. "The Power and Pitfalls of Experiments in Development Economics: Some Non-random Reflections," Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 32(4), pages 515-548.
    17. Raghabendra Chattopadhyay & Esther Duflo, 2004. "Women as Policy Makers: Evidence from a Randomized Policy Experiment in India," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 72(5), pages 1409-1443, September.
    18. repec:pri:rpdevs:instruments_of_development.pdf is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Basu, Kaushik, 2013. "Shared prosperity and the mitigation of poverty : in practice and in precept," Policy Research Working Paper Series 6700, The World Bank.
    20. Hoover,Kevin D., 2001. "Causality in Macroeconomics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521002882.
    21. repec:pri:rpdevs:deaton_instruments_randomization_learning_all_04april_2010 is not listed on IDEAS
    22. John Ifcher & Homa Zarghamee, 2011. "Happiness and Time Preference: The Effect of Positive Affect in a Random-Assignment Experiment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(7), pages 3109-3129, December.
    23. Sen, Amartya K, 1980. "Description as Choice," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 32(3), pages 353-369, November.
    24. repec:pri:cheawb:deaton%20instruments%20of%20development%20keynes%20lecture%202009 is not listed on IDEAS
    25. Cartwright,Nancy, 2007. "Hunting Causes and Using Them," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521677981.
    26. Manski, Charles F., 2013. "Public Policy in an Uncertain World: Analysis and Decisions," Economics Books, Harvard University Press, number 9780674066892, Spring.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bamberger, Michael & Tarsilla, Michele & Hesse-Biber, Sharlene, 2016. "Why so many “rigorous” evaluations fail to identify unintended consequences of development programs: How mixed methods can contribute," Evaluation and Program Planning, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 155-162.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Guido W. Imbens, 2010. "Better LATE Than Nothing: Some Comments on Deaton (2009) and Heckman and Urzua (2009)," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(2), pages 399-423, June.
    2. Angus Deaton, 2009. "Instruments of development: Randomization in the tropics, and the search for the elusive keys to economic development," Working Papers 1128, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
    3. Baldwin Kate & Bhavnani Rikhil R., 2015. "Ancillary Studies of Experiments: Opportunities and Challenges," Journal of Globalization and Development, De Gruyter, vol. 6(1), pages 113-146, June.
    4. Karthik Muralidharan & Paul Niehaus, 2017. "Experimentation at Scale," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 31(4), pages 103-124, Fall.
    5. Kate Baldwin & Rikhil R. Bhavnani, 2013. "Ancillary Experiments: Opportunities and Challenges," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2013-024, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    6. Florent Bédécarrats & Isabelle Guérin & François Roubaud, 2019. "All that Glitters is not Gold. The Political Economy of Randomized Evaluations in Development," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 50(3), pages 735-762, May.
    7. William Easterly, 2009. "Can the West Save Africa?," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(2), pages 373-447, June.
    8. Susan Athey & Guido Imbens, 2016. "The Econometrics of Randomized Experiments," Papers 1607.00698, arXiv.org.
    9. Mattoo, Aaditya & Cadot, Olivier & Gourdon, Julien & Fernandes, Ana Margarida, 2011. "Impact Evaluation of Trade Interventions: Paving the Way," CEPR Discussion Papers 8638, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    10. Baldwin, Kate & Bhavnani, Rikhil R., 2013. "Ancillary Experiments: Opportunities and Challenges," WIDER Working Paper Series 024, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    11. Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo, 2009. "The Experimental Approach to Development Economics," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 1(1), pages 151-178, May.
    12. Temple, Jonathan R.W., 2010. "Aid and Conditionality," Handbook of Development Economics, in: Dani Rodrik & Mark Rosenzweig (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 4415-4523, Elsevier.
    13. Michael Christian Lehman, 2014. "Long-Run Effects Of Conditional Cash Transfers," Anais do XLI Encontro Nacional de Economia [Proceedings of the 41st Brazilian Economics Meeting] 223, ANPEC - Associação Nacional dos Centros de Pós-Graduação em Economia [Brazilian Association of Graduate Programs in Economics].
    14. Guido W. Imbens & Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2009. "Recent Developments in the Econometrics of Program Evaluation," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(1), pages 5-86, March.
    15. Edward Asiedu & Dean Karlan & Monica Lambon-Quayefio & Christopher Udry, 2021. "A call for structured ethics appendices in social science papers," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 118(29), pages 2024570118-, July.
    16. George F. DeMartino, 2021. "The specter of irreparable ignorance: counterfactuals and causality in economics," Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, Springer, vol. 2(2), pages 253-276, July.
    17. Krauss, Alexander, 2021. "Assessing the overall validity of randomised controlled trials," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 112576, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    18. Committee, Nobel Prize, 2019. "Understanding development and poverty alleviation," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 2019-2, Nobel Prize Committee.
    19. Reddy, Sanjay G., 2012. "Randomise This! On Poor Economics," Review of Agrarian Studies, Foundation for Agrarian Studies, vol. 2(2), December.
    20. Sarah Tahamont & Zubin Jelveh & Aaron Chalfin & Shi Yan & Benjamin Hansen, 2019. "Administrative Data Linking and Statistical Power Problems in Randomized Experiments," NBER Working Papers 25657, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:6722. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.