A SUCCESSFUL ECONOMICS EXPERIMENT IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY.

A SUCCESSFUL ECONOMICS EXPERIMENT IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY. When I studied economics, experiments were rare. Economists took data as they found them. Professors Duflo and Banerjee founded an institute at MIT which done over 200 economics experiments. One experiment dealt with the problem of absentee teachers in some Indian schools. In 60 schools, teachers were given a timestamping camera and asked to take photographs of themselves with their students at the beginning and end of each day. In the control group of 60 schools, there were no cameras—and the teachers were twice as likely to be absent. And the students in the control group schools did not perform as well on tests at the end of the experiment.