Solutions to many of today’s key development challenges hinge not on creating new technologies and solutions, but in understanding why the poor do not adopt seemingly beneficial technologies that already exist. Throughout the developing world, there are countless examples of technologies that appear to be welfare enhancing but are adopted by the poor at very low rates. Examples span health, finance, and agriculture sectors, and include cleaner cook-stoves, anti-malarial bednets, toilets, fertilizer, weather insurance, and improved seed varieties. To make progress on these problems, we need to understand the sources of behavioral or structural barriers to new technology adoption, in order to devise policies and marketing strategies to address those barriers. This talk will highlight economic analysis and randomized-controlled-trial based field experimental methods applied in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to make progress on these questions.

The report leading to the creation of the SSRC in 1923 outlined several major challenges for social science: data collection, interpretation, measurement, and causality. This lecture will explore the extent to which newly available administrative datasets — linked together to create what is sometimes referred to as “big data” — can help address these challenges and contribute to our understanding of the causes and consequences of eviction and poverty in the United States. The lecture will draw heavily on a study of eviction in Chicago and New York, which is joint work with Robert Collinson, John Eric Humphries, Nick Mader, Davin Reed and Daniel Tannenbaum.

Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and facilitating adaptation to climate change requires effective public investments, yet many policies and programs lack crucial evidence of their effectiveness. In low and middle income countries, the cost of putting resources toward ineffective policies is particularly high. This talk discusses two recent randomized controlled trials aimed at filling the evidence gap. The first tests novel approaches to reduce agricultural emissions in India. The second improves smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate shocks in Niger. Findings highlight the need for piloting before scaling up policy — in both projects, cost effectiveness was improved through innovative policy design.

In this lecture, Professor David Broockman explores how Americans are politically polarized, why–and why not–this matters, and potential solutions. Professor Broockman discusses how his research has challenged conventional wisdom on: (1) to what extent Americans’ frustrations with government result from politicians being too extreme, (2) to what extent voters’ dislike of each other–so-called affective polarization–contributes to the nation’s political challenges, and (3) how we all can have more productive and persuasive conversations with our political rivals.

In this lecture, Professor Milkman will discuss three massive field experiments testing dozens of different ways of encouraging increased vaccination. First, she will discuss a “megastudy” encouraging flu vaccination at doctor’s appointments among 47,306 patients of two large U.S. health systems in which 42 scientists worked in teams to design a total of 19 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles.