THREE THEMES ON FIELD EXPERIMENTS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

We discuss the following three themes on the use of field experiments to study economic development: (1) We summarize the arguments for and against using experiments to gather behavioral data in the field; (2) We argue and illustrate that field experiments can provide data on behavior that can be used in subsequent analyses of the effect of behavioral social capital on economic outcomes; and (3) We illustrate that field experiments can be used as a development tool on their own to teach communities about incentives and strategic interaction.