Chris Blattman

Chris Blattman

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The new experimental handbook

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The new Gerber and Green textbook is now out. I predict it will become the must-read handbook for existing and aspiring experimenters, and hopefully the basis for more courses in more places.

In case you are looking for more references, my go-to book for non-experimental causal analysis is Mostly Harmless, and for general stats I first reach for Wooldridge’s Intro or Advanced texts.

27 Responses

  2. I haven’t seen the Gerber and Greene textbook, so cannot comment on that, but both ‘Mostly Harmless’ by Angrist and Pischke and ‘Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs’ by Shadish, Cook & Campbell should be essential reading for any one interested in evaluation:

    – MHE, as its title suggests, is an econometrics textbook – it is a great book for learning statistical methods applied to experimental and non-experimental research designs, specifically from an economics perspective. It teaches you how to get into the data, analyze it, and discuss results. It covers the most popular econometric techniques such as RDD, DID and of course, RCTs.

    – The Shadish et al. book is more of a foundational book, that draws from a broader set of social science disciplines that have used evaluative methods, such as psychology, public health and education. While experimental research is relatively new in economics, it has a long history in other disciplines, and this book provides some excellent examples of research designs that are not commonly used in economics. It’s a lot more theoretical, but a great book for anyone interested in research design. Their work on construct validity in particular, is extremely interesting (and sadly, often ignored in recent evaluations).

    Also worth a quick read, is this article about Donald Campbell, from a recent book – it provides a great insight into the man who developed the foundations of evaluation theory as it is practiced today:

    http://www.corwin.com/upm-data/5075_Alkin_Chapter_4.pdf

  3. Curious how you regard the classic books in this genre such as Campbell and Stanely (1963), or the latest version by Campbel, Shadish, and Cook (2002)? And how would you compare those texts to this new publication ?

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