I am a researcher on global health at Our World in Data, and a founder and editor of Works in Progress at Stripe.
My research interests are in health, epidemiology and the social sciences.
You can contact me at saloni@ourworldindata.org or find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/salonium
Hey Marius, thank you!
I wish I could answer this better, but I don’t know enough to have a good answer to how to scale policy RCTs, especially since they’re quite different from clinical RCTs (they often can’t administer the treatment in a standardised way, there’s usually no way to blind participants to what they’re receiving, they usually don’t track/measure participants as regularly, etc.) Though those are also factors that make them messier in larger projects.
I’ve read this blog post by Michael Clemens, which I found was a useful summary of two books on the topic: https://cgdev.org/blog/scaling-programs-effectively-two-new-books-potential-pitfalls-and-tools-avoid-them
But I think there are often situations where they can be leveraged for large-scale interventions. A good recent example is this experiment on street lighting and its effect in reducing crime. There are some features of the policy make it easier to study at scale. Crime data exists at the right scale (you don’t need to track individual participants to find out about crime rates), streetlighting is easy to standardise, you can measure the effects at the level of neighbourhood clusters rather than at the level of individuals. So maybe that’s a good way of thinking about how to scale up RCTs—to find treatments and outcomes that are easier to implement and measure at a large scale.