There has been an explosion of experimental research in development economics over the last 15 years. In this presentation, Professor Abhijit Banerjee, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained the reasons why there is so much excitement towards experimental research in development economics and why policymakers should be excited as well. He also discussed the strengths and limitations of this approach in theory and in practice. He argued that the main virtue of randomized experiments is that, owing to the close collaboration between researchers and implementers, they allow the estimation of parameters that would not otherwise be possible to evaluate.