BRAM BELLONI
Fight poverty with experiments Patricio Dalton and Elena Cettolin build on research by Nobel laureates with the ultimate goal of helping people escape poverty. By Joris Janssen
H
ow can you get an economy up and running? And how do you keep it that way? The science of economics has no shortage of complex theories, models, and ways of thinking about this. But how do you find out whether an economic measure devised somewhere around a policy-making table
14 | New Scientist | Tilburg University Economics and Management | Research Special
actually makes sense? For this, economists are getting help from an unexpected source: medicine. After all, the way in which researchers test whether a drug works is also very suit able for testing whether economic inter ventions work. Take, for example, research into the effectiveness of all kinds of devel opment aid. The method works so well that the three economists who introduced this research strategy into economics science received the Nobel Prize for it in 2019. Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer have since become true celebrities in the relatively new research field of experimental economics. Development economist Patricio Dalton and experimental economist Elena Cettolin,
