Experimental Conversations

If you are getting an advanced degree in economics or another social science (and even if you already have one), drop what you are doing and read this series of interviews with leading thinkers and researchers. There is no better collection of ideas, insights, and personal perspectives on what constitutes good evidence about the world, and the tools we should use to understand more—and hopefully make the world a better place.
—Dennis Whittle, cofounder of Feedback Labs and GlobalGiving

This book, through a series of fascinating conversations with those who were there from the beginning, documents the revolution that has taken place in development economics. Some skeptics notwithstanding, randomized experiments are now a fully accepted and widely used tool in the arsenal of development economists. The conversations here show how this happened, its relation to methodological changes in other fields of economics, and what the thinking was of those who brought about these changes. I highly recommend this book for all development economists, as well as for others interested in methodology in economics in general.
—Guido Imbens, The Applied Econometrics Professor, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; coauthor of Causal Inference for Statistics, Social, and Biomedical Sciences

In his new book Experimental Conversations: Perspectives on Randomized Trials in Development Economics, Tim Ogden has assembled interviews with a distinguished group that interacts with RCTs in every imaginable way.... [T]his collection provides great insight into many of the great minds of those producing and using development economics in our time.
—The World Bank Development Impact Blog