Chair: Richard Blundell (IFS and UCL); Speakers: Esther Duflo (MIT) and Mark Rosenzweig (Yale); Discussant: Orazio Attanasio (IFS and UCL).

Randomized Control Trial experiments play an increasingly central role in the evaluation of economic policy, especially development policy. But how reliable are experimental approaches? Do they answer the key questions necessary for improving the design of policy interventions? How should they be compared to non-experimental evaluations? These are some of the important questions in the analysis of development policy to be considered in this special session on Experimental and Non-Experimental Approaches to Development Policy. Richard Blundell, Research Director of IFS will be in the Chair with invited presentations by two of the leading experts in the world on development policy - Esther Duflo, Director of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, and Mark Rosenzweig, Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. Orazio Attanasio, Director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Development Policies at IFS and UCL, will lead the discussion.