Hello and welcome to Morales on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. The Nobel Memorial

Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly this week to Abidjit Banagee and Estadou

Flow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kramer of Harvard.

To find out more about their work, I spoke to our favourite economist, Tim Harford. He usually

presents Morales of course, but for one day a year he takes office presenter hat and puts

on his economist hat, a rare treat because he does prefer to remain undercover.

Tim, always a pleasure interviewing you for your own show.

Pleasure is online. Thank you for being here. So, tell us about the winners, why did they win?

I'm so pleased that this trio has won. They are amazing, they are young, they are dynamic,

they're doing just brilliant work. A lot of things they could have won for, but in particular,

they were cited for promoting experiments in development economics. So the big idea here is

the same way in which you would run a randomized controlled trial in medicine, an idea that we've

got very used to was first popularised after the Second World War. You could do that in economics too.

So what kind of trial have they done? The first one that Michael Kramer did with a student of his

called Edward Miguel was testing what sort of interventions might improve the performance of

school kids in Kenya. In this particular region of Kenya, maybe we should supply them with textbooks,

maybe we should supply them with blackboards, writing materials. What actually worked was treating

the children for worms so that they wouldn't get particular kinds of parasitic worms.

And the reason this was turned out to be so effective was because meant they didn't miss school,

they were better nourished, they were better able to concentrate, and it was incredibly cheap.

And not only was it incredibly cheap, but once you start treating some children for worms,

even the children who aren't getting worms are less likely to pick up the infection because it's

...