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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.

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
Noam Yuchtman
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...

Welfare Benefits of Decentralized Solar Energy for the Rural Poor in India

To evaluate the demand for solar electricity, researchers randomly offered solar microgrid connections at different prices to households in rural areas of Bihar, India. Demand for microgrids was highly variable and low when they were offered at market price, likely because there were several other...

Graduating Low-Income Households in Honduras

Bram Thuysbaert
To test this theory, researchers in six countries evaluated a multi-faceted approach aimed at improving long term income of low-income households. They found that the approach had long-lasting economic and self-employment impacts and that the long-run benefits, measured in terms of household...

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...

The Impact of Private Tutoring Prices on Student Attendance and Performance in India

Priya Mukherjee
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to measure the demand for private tutoring services and estimate how pricing can influence enrollment in these services. Results suggest that higher prices reduced demand for private tutoring and also led to higher drop-out rates over time, with no...

Increasing the Electoral Participation of Immigrants: Experimental Evidence from France

Guillaume Liegey
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of a general voter outreach effort on the political participation of immigrants relative to participation of non-immigrants. The canvassing treatment increased voter turnout of immigrants without affecting turnout of non-immigrants.