Date, Location: November 7, 2019 (New York)
Speakers:
- Susan Athey, Professor of Economics, Stanford University
- Sylvain Chassang, Professor of Economics, New York University
- Rajeev Dehejia, Co–Director of NYU Development Research Institute; Professor of Economic and Public Service, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Director of Policy Specialization at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service
- Michael Kremer, Gates Professor of Developing Societies, Harvard University
- Rohini Pande, Professor of Economics, Yale University
- Mark Rosenzweig, Professor of International Economics, Yale University
- Cyrus Samii, Professor of Economics, New York University
Overview: The 2019 DRI Annual Conference focused on the theme “From Local to Global: The External Validity Challenge of Experiments.” In recent decades, the use of experimental and quasi-experimental methods has become widespread across a range of fields in economics, such as labor, education, health, and especially development. The emphasis on experimental and quasi- experimental methods was driven by an attempt to generate internally valid results, i.e., accurate estimates of the impact of the policy of interest in the time and place the experiment was implemented. But the now global scale of experiments points to the central question of external validity: to what extent and how can we generalize the knowledge generated by experiments beyond the setting of the experiment to other contexts?
