Field Experiments
Nava Ashraf
HBS 4430 / Econ 2041
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 last third of the course is dedicated to introducing and studying particularly fruitful areas for research using field experiments and to students' presentations of their own research ideas.
Advanced MBAs, MPPs, and MPA-IDS, who want to learn the technical skills of running and managing a field experiment, for the purpose of conducting randomized impact evaluations of innovative programs in the companies and NGOs that they will be part of and/or advising, will be allowed to take the course upon permission of the instructor.
All students should be intending to run a field experiment in the near future, and ideally in the summer of 2008, immediately following the course. The course assignment will be a completed proposal (of approximately 15 pages) outlining the theory and design for the field experiment, and a completed IRB application for human subjects approval.