March 2010
By Jonathan Bauchet and Jonathan Morduch
An Introduction to Impact Evaluations with Randomized Designs
Randomized experiments are increasingly popular ways to evaluate the impacts of development interventions. They provide hope that we can overcome important biases common to nearly all statistical evaluations. When done well, randomized control trials (RCTs) can provide clear, transparent, and credible evidence in complicated contexts, and it’s not surprising that they dominate clinical research in medicine.