Esther Duflo discusses the fact that in social policy one cannot check the big questions, i.e. whether development assistance as an aggregate is helpful, because there is no counterfactual. She then suggests to focus on smaller questions such as what prevents or incentiveses people from immunizing their kids or whether mosquito bednets should be distributed for free. These questions can be answered by using randomized control trials as in the medical sciences. Thus, she argues, by bringing the experimental method to social policy analysis better decisions as to where allocate funds can be made. 2010 Level: beginner Social experiments to fight poverty Esther Duflo TED Talks A rethinking of the way to fight global poverty and winners of the Swedish Bank Prize for Economics. 2019 Level: advanced Social Experiments to Alleviate Poverty Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer Exploring Economics In this podcast, Nalia Kabeer talks about her work, criticising the way in which Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) is adopted as a sole form of impact assessment. At the beginning of the talk, she briefly describes The Ultra Poor Project (the context of her study), RCTs and its critiques (such as lack of acknowledgement of human agency, heterogeneity, and social context); also, the problem that most RCTs practitioners do not allow for qualitative research conducted in an integrated way as it might cause their studies “being contaminated.” 2019 Level: beginner Naila Kabeer on Why Randomized Controlled Trials need to include Human Agency Naila Kabeer (Interviewed by Duncan Green) Poverty to Power In this course you will study the different facets of human development in topics such as education health gender the family land relations risk informal and formal norms public policy and institutions While studying each of these topics we will delve into the following questions What determines the decisions of … Level: advanced Foundations of Development Policy: Advanced Development Economics Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Esther Duflo & Benjamin Olken Massachusetts Institute of Technology This statistics and data analysis course will introduce you to the essential notions of probability and statistics We will cover techniques in modern data analysis estimation regression and econometrics prediction experimental design randomized control trials and A B testing machine learning and data visualization We will illustrate these concepts with … Level: advanced Data Analysis for Social Scientists Esther Duflo & Sarah Fisher Ellison Massachusetts Institute of Technology