-TheWire.in The problem with the domination of RCTs in development is the depreciation of other, more relevant findings using different methodologies. This year’s Nobel prize in economics has been awarded to the three researchers Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, who are well-known for their field experiments in the form of randomised controlled trials (RCTs). But can that methodology make meaningful contributions to solving the problem of our schools failing our...

-The Indian Express It is crucial for young girls to have female mentors because research shows that it encourages them to persevere ahead, despite difficulties. The person who convinced me to do a PhD in economics was Abhijit Banerjee of MIT, when I worked with him on one of the first randomised controlled trials in the field of economics in the late 1990s. During my PhD, I had the good fortune...

-The Hindu Despite limitations, the use of randomised control trials has led to a paradigm shift in development policy evaluation If Rip Van Winkle was an academic economist and woke up from a two-decade long sleep this week, he would be baffled by the news of the Nobel Prize in Economics this year awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for pioneering the use of randomised control trials (RCTs) in...

-The Tribune A serious methodological flaw of the RCT approach that has been pointed out by ethnographic studies of poverty is that its overemphasis on quantitative method has deprived it of the insights of qualitative methods. There is some recognition of the flaw by admitting that a mixed method approach can be useful, but the approach remains hostile to qualitative methods. THE award of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics to Abhijit...

-The Indian Express This year’s Nobel laureates shone the light on ways to address poverty As a young research associate, I stopped at a roadside dhaba with my boss, me armed with hand-sanitiser and a spoon, while my boss dug in to a plate of fish with her hands, devoured it down to the bones, washed her hands at the public sink, and proceeded to the car. My boss was Esther...