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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.

Does Campaign Spending Work in the United States?

In partnership with candidates, researcher Alan Gerber conducted five randomized evaluations in two states to measure the effect of campaign mailings on vote shares. The results suggest that incumbent spending has a negligible effect on vote share, whereas challenger spending was effective.

Research and Impacts of Digital Financial Services

A new paper describes recent evidence on what works for financial inclusion and identifies products and innovations that address key financial market failures facing poor households. Written by J-PAL affiliates Dean Karlan, Rohini Pande, Tavneet Suri, Jonathan Zinman, and co-authors, this paper also...

Relationship Banking in India

Researchers evaluated whether the intensity of personalized interaction between borrowers and loan officers in India influenced borrowers’ repayment behavior. They found that clients with personal relationship managers at the bank had better repayment behavior but were not more satisfied with their...

Online Customer Discrimination against Female Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa

Matthew Pecenco
Edward Rubin
Researchers evaluated the impact of gender-based discrimination on female teleworkers’ productivity in online sales interactions with customers in Africa. When a customer chat representative had a female-sounding name, it led to significantly fewer purchases, and slower and more reserved reactions...

J-PAL Africa Project Incubation Fund – 2017 Round

J-PAL Africa, located in SALDRU in the School of Economics at the University of Cape Town, has a pool of funds to support researchers to carry out exploratory research work on policy relevant questions related to South Africa. This work should lead to the development of a full research proposal for...

The Impact of Drought-Tolerant Rice on Local Labor Markets in India

Researchers are testing the impact that stress-tolerant seeds, which have better yields than conventional varieties under weather shocks, affect landless laborers.

The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market

Amira Abulafi
Claudia Goldin
For-profit (and often online) universities account for nearly half of all postsecondary growth over the last decade, yet relatively little is known about how employers value and compare these education types. To test this, researchers randomly submitted resumes with different characteristics and...