Impact evaluations can help to inform policy decisions, but they are rooted in particular contexts and to what extent they generalize is an open question. I exploit a new data set of impact evaluation results and find a large amount of effect heterogeneity. Effect sizes vary systematically with study characteristics, with government-implemented programs having smaller effect sizes than academic or non-governmental organization-implemented programs, even controlling for sample size. I show that treatment effect heterogeneity can be appreciably reduced by taking study characteristics into account.

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