Field Experiments (PhD)
Description
This course is for doctoral students who want to learn how to design and run field experiments as a research methodology. The objective is for students to refine their own experimental designs and be able to run them by the end of the course, leading to an academic paper.
The course will be hands-on and oriented towards providing technical skills for the design and implementation of field experiments, including overcoming the many possible associated pitfalls. We will examine in-depth examples of how field experiments are designed, implemented and analyzed, including the “back story” of several published field experiments.
We will also discuss at length throughout the course how to use field experiments to test academic theory as opposed to only for policy/impact evaluation. The course also introduces particularly fruitful areas for research using field experiments and facilitates students’ presentations of their own research ideas.