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Browse news articles about J-PAL and our affiliated professors, and read our press releases and monthly global and research newsletters. For media inquiries, please email us.

Reducing Parent-School Information Gaps and Improving Education Outcomes: Evidence from High-Frequency Text Messages

Samuel Berlinski
Mattias Busso
Claudia Martinez
Researchers are testing the impact of increased teacher-parent communication via SMS messaging on parents’ involvement and youths’ education outcomes.

Moral Incentives to Increase Credit Card Repayment in Indonesia

Daniel Gottlieb
Martin Kanz
Researchers partnered with a large Indonesian Islamic bank to evaluate the impact of sending moral appeals in reminder text messages to late-paying credit card holders. Messages stating that non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice increased the number of clients...

Creating Incentives to Decrease Water Waste in Zambia

Researchers partnered with a water company in Zambia to evaluate whether improved information and incentives can help households manage their water usage. They found that targeting incentives to higher household water consumers might be an effective way to reduce water consumption.

Providing Free Bank Accounts in Chile, Malawi, and Uganda

Researchers partnered with banks in three countries to see if removing the costs to opening basic bank accounts would lead to more households opening and using bank accounts. Overall, use of the accounts was low across all three countries, and being offered a free, basic bank account had no impact...

Clinical Decision Support for Radiology Imaging in the United States

Sarah Abraham
Joseph Doyle
Sarah Reimer
Researchers studied the impact of a clinical decision support software system on high-cost imaging orders. They found that clinical decision support reduced the number of high-cost scans targeted by the software but did not change the total number of high-cost scans ordered.