Economics summarize the paper
Impact evaluations can help to inform policy, but they are rooted in
particular contexts and to what extent they generalize is an open and
important question. We discuss alternative measures of heterogeneity
of impact evaluation results and relate them to generalizability, or how
much we can extrapolate from a set of studies to another setting. We
then exploit a new data set of results on a wide variety of interventions
to provide some typical values and discuss their interpretation.
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1 Introduction
Recent years have seen extraordinary growth in the use of rigorous impact evaluations
in the social sciences, particularly in international development. This expansion
of evidence is welcome. However, if this evidence is to be useful in informing policy,
we must also know to what extent the results from impact evaluations generalize to
new contexts. Concerns about external validity have stimulated lively theoretical debates
in economics (Deaton, 2010; Pritchett and Sandefur, 2013). Further, examples
of studies which raised questions about the external validity of initial findings have
begun to trickle in (Bold et al., 2010; Allcott, 2015)
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