Randomized Test of Microcredit in Mongolia
12/23/11
A few years ago, Alaka Holla and Michael Kremer, the latter a leader in the randomization revolution, opened a CGD working paper with this interesting observation:
Over the past 10 to 15 years, randomized evaluations have gone from being a rarity to a standard part of the toolkit of academic development economics. We are now at a point where, at least for some issues, we can stand back and look beyond the results of a single evaluation to see whether certain common lessons emerge.
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) this week 
The biggest development in development economics lately is the surge in the use of randomized trials. As in careful drug trials, randomly giving some people a "treatment," such as an offer of microcredit, and comparing how they do to people not offered can be a powerful research tool.