Field experiments are experiments carried out outside of laboratory settings.
A mosquito net is a type of meshed curtain that is circumferentially draped over a bed or a sleeping area, to offer the sleeper barrier protection against bites and stings from mosquitos, flies, and other pest insects, and thus against the diseases they may carry. Examples of such preventable insect-borne diseases include malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, zika virus, Chagas disease and various forms of encephalitis, including the West Nile virus.
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French–American economist who is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies. In 2019, Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." He and Esther Duflo are married, and became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel or Nobel Memorial Prize.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty, and builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, donors, and others to generate new research, share knowledge, and scale up effective programs.
Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Chief Economist of USAID and Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with economists Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, Karlan served as director of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium of researchers focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals.
Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is an American development economist currently serving as the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a Berkeley-based hub for research on development economics.
Robin Burgess is a British economist who is Professor of Economics, Co-founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, as well as Co-Founder and Director of the Economics of Energy and the Environment (EEE) program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Youth Impact is a non-governmental organization based in Gaborone, Botswana that scales evidence-based programs in health and education. The mission is to connect youth with proven life-saving information, and Youth Impact has reached over 100,000 young people. Youth Impact currently runs two programs: Zones and Teaching at the Right Level.
Paul William Glewwe is an economist and Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include economic development and growth, the economics of the public sector, and poverty and welfare. He formerly was the Director of the Center for International Food and Agricultural Policy and served as co-chair of the education programme of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).
Rema Hanna is an economist and is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South East Asia Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Moreover, she currently serves as co-director of the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) research programme at Harvard's Center for International Development and a scientific co-director for Southeast Asia at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Her research focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of public services in developing countries, with specific focus on service delivery and the impacts of corruption. She is also the co-chair of the editorial board for the academic journal Review of Economics and Statistics.
Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.
Raquel Fernández is an economist and currently the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professor of Economics at New York University. She is also a fellow of the Econometric Society.
Marcella Alsan is an American physician and economist at Harvard University. She is known for her works in the field of health inequality and development economics. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
The 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to the economist couple Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo-Banerjee and their colleague Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Banerjee and Duflo are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize. The press release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted:
"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research. They have laid the foundations of the best way to design measures that reduce global poverty"
Emily Louise Breza is an American development economist currently serving as the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a board member at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the International Growth Centre and National Bureau of Economic Research. Breza's primary research interests are in development economics, in particular the interplay between social networks and household finance. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Evidence Action is an American non-profit organization founded in 2013 that scales cost-effective development interventions with rigorous evidence supporting their efficacy. The organization operates four main programs: the Deworm the World Initiative, Safe Water Now, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. It also operates an Accelerator program, whereby new development interventions are screened and scaled according to efficacy. Vox Media has described Evidence Action as taking a "VC approach to development work".
Vincent Pons is a French economist who is the Michael B. Kim Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Pons's research focuses on questions in political economy and development economics.
