ABSTRACT

This paper examines a new set of average cost data from a large international NGO, finding that costs for the same intervention can vary as much as twenty times when scale or context is changed. Despite this challenge to the generalisability of cost estimates, a high proportion of the variation can be explained by observable program and contextual characteristics. Binary questions about whether cost estimates are externally valid do not provide a useful framework for wider inference; instead, researchers can gain analytical traction if they study what factors cause the costs of specific interventions to change, and by how much.

中文翻译：

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认真对待干预成本：用于推断成本的新旧工具箱

摘要

本文研究了来自大型国际非政府组织的一组新的平均成本数据，发现当规模或环境发生变化时，相同干预措施的成本可能相差多达20倍。尽管对成本估算的通用性提出了挑战，但可以通过观察到的程序和上下文特征来解释很大一部分变化。关于成本估算是否对外部有效的二元问题不能为广泛推论提供有用的框架；相反，如果研究人员研究哪些因素导致特定干预措施的成本发生了变化以及变化的幅度，则研究人员可以获得分析的动力。