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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.

Impacts and Challenges of a Teacher Training Program in Nepal

Julie Schaffner
Uttam Sharma
Training teachers to improve teacher quality and student learning is a common strategy taken by policymakers. In Nepal, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation of a government teacher training program for math and science teachers to evaluate the impact on student learning in secondary schools...

Testing Commitment Devices for Remittances among Filipino Migrants in Rome

Giuseppe De Arcangelis
Majlinda Joxhe
David McKenzie
Erwin Tiongson
Researchers evaluated the impact of enabling Filipino migrants to label remittances for education on the amount of money they sent home. Labeling remittances as funds to be used for education raised the amount of money migrants sent home substantially (over 15 percent).

Offering Amenities to Increase Health Care Demand in Mexico

Researchers conducted an evaluation to test the impact of offering a high-amenity diagnostic consultation for cataracts at different prices on uptake of an underutilized service—cataract surgery—in Mexico. Lower prices for the high-amenity consultation increased exposure to amenities, which...

The Value of Regulatory Discretion: Estimates from Environmental Inspections in India

Researchers are evaluating the impact of making environmental inspections of high-polluting industrial plants more frequent and removing regulator discretion in selecting plants for inspection on regulatory compliance and pollution emissions in Gujarat, India.

Using GPS-enabled Cellphones to Monitor Agricultural Extension Agents in Paraguay

Researchers partnered with the Government of Paraguay to measure the impact of a new monitoring technology—GPS-enabled cell phones—on the job performance of agricultural extension agents (AEAs). Overall, cell phones improved AEAs’ performance by increasing the share of farmers visited, and...

Tablet-Based Financial Education in Colombia

Matthew Bird
Lina Cardona-Sosa
Pablo Lavado
Researchers collaborated with Fundación Capital and the Government of Colombia to conduct a randomized evaluation of LISTA, a tablet-based financial education program designed for participants in Colombia's government CCT program, to study its impact on financial knowledge and behavior. LISTA had...

A Safer Monitoring Tool to Help Workers Report Harassment in Bangladesh

Researchers evaluated how different ways of asking questions in surveys affect workers’ likelihood of reporting harassment at a firm in Bangladesh. A survey technique that gave people plausible deniability led to workers reporting more abuses, allowing the firm to access more accurate data on the...

Can Transferring Policing Power to Community Members Improve Legal Protection in Papua New Guinea?

Jasper Cooper
The researcher used a randomized evaluation in Papua New Guinea to study the impact of the Community Auxiliary Police (CAP), a program that devolves policing powers to carefully selected community members. Results suggest increased state presence may have widened the gap between men and women’s...