The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
Our affiliated professors are based at over 120 universities and conduct randomized evaluations around the world to design, evaluate, and improve programs and policies aimed at reducing poverty. They set their own research agendas, raise funds to support their evaluations, and work with J-PAL staff on research, policy outreach, and training.
Our Board of Directors, which is composed of J-PAL affiliated professors and senior management, provides overall strategic guidance to J-PAL, our sector programs, and regional offices.
J-PAL recognizes that there is a lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of economics and in our field of work. Read about what actions we are taking to address this.
We host events around the world and online to share results and policy lessons from randomized evaluations, to build new partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and to train organizations on how to design and conduct randomized evaluations, and use evidence from impact evaluations.
Browse news articles about J-PAL and our affiliated professors, read our press releases and monthly global and research newsletters, and connect with us for media inquiries.
Based at leading universities around the world, our experts are economists who use randomized evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty. Connect with us for all media inquiries and we'll help you find the right person to shed insight on your story.
J-PAL is based at MIT in Cambridge, MA and has seven regional offices at leading universities in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
J-PAL is based at MIT in Cambridge, MA and has seven regional offices at leading universities in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Our global office is based at the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It serves as the head office for our network of seven independent regional offices.
Led by affiliated professors, J-PAL sectors guide our research and policy work by conducting literature reviews; by managing research initiatives that promote the rigorous evaluation of innovative interventions by affiliates; and by summarizing findings and lessons from randomized evaluations and producing cost-effectiveness analyses to help inform relevant policy debates.
Led by affiliated professors, J-PAL sectors guide our research and policy work by conducting literature reviews; by managing research initiatives that promote the rigorous evaluation of innovative interventions by affiliates; and by summarizing findings and lessons from randomized evaluations and producing cost-effectiveness analyses to help inform relevant policy debates.
How do policies affecting private sector firms impact productivity gaps between higher-income and lower-income countries? How do firms’ own policies impact economic growth and worker welfare?
How can we identify effective policies and programs in low- and middle-income countries that provide financial assistance to low-income families, insuring against shocks and breaking poverty traps?
Personalized messages that use machine learning to tailor reminders that are predicted to be most effective have the power to substantially increase healthy behaviors, and there is a need for more randomized evaluations to validate the approach. In two...
Each year, millions of Medicaid beneficiaries must redemonstrate their eligibility to avoid losing coverage. Challenges with the required paperwork can result in eligible people losing their benefits for procedural reasons (i.e. because their paperwork was...
This project will administer an endline survey for an ongoing randomized evaluation with an estimated sample size of 2,400 participants. We are collaborating with the Center for Caregiver Advancement (CCA) to evaluate the impact of training for home care...
Effective interventions to address adversity in the transition to parenthood for low-income families have tremendous potential to transform adult outcomes. Home visiting programs, such as the Nurse Family Partnership, are considered “evidence based” policy by...
Adults with limited English proficiency may have difficulty navigating the complex bureaucracy of the U.S. health care system, leading to worse access and outcomes. We propose to examine the effect of English language training on health care utilization and...
Mental health conditions among low-income immigrants in the United States are likely triggered or worsened by their migration experience. Significant barriers to accessing healthcare services among this population may further contribute to the persistence of...
Hospital readmissions produce $45 billion in spending in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. There is a growing recognition that social determinants of health are important drivers of preventable hospital readmissions, especially in vulnerable populations...
Take-up of safety net programs in the United States is often incomplete, ranging from 84% for SNAP and Medicaid adults to 25% for TANF. Administrative hassles involved with proving initial and continued eligibility, which often require substantial effort by...
For many government safety net programs, beneficiaries must regularly demonstrate eligibility to avoid losing benefits. This project uses a field experiment to identify the effect of outreach strategy on beneficiaries’ maintenance of Medicaid enrollment. The...
AI tools for diagnostic imaging could reduce costs while providing more equitable access to high-quality radiology services. Despite rapid technical progress, however, human input is going to be indispensable in the foreseeable future for a variety of...
Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) cover about 80% of California’s 12 million Medicaid enrollees. Medicaid MCOs can earn millions of dollars in federal waiver funds through a pay-for-performance system called the Quality Incentive Pool (QIP). Even so, QIP...
We plan to evaluate the causal impact of labor organizing on worker welfare and service quality in the health care sector. Existing observational evidence suggests that unionization leads to increased staff retention and productivity among health care workers...
Patients with End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) account for 7% of Medicare fee-for-service spending despite making up less than 1% of the Medicare enrollment. For patients with ESRD, home dialysis, as opposed to facility-based dialysis, is often associated with...
Many Americans, in particular low-income individuals, suffer from common mental illnesses such as depression or anxiety at one point in their lives without receiving any treatment. Besides direct consequences of mental illnesses on well-being, even moderate...
Combatting the rise of the opioid epidemic is a central challenge of U.S. health care policy. A promising approach for improving welfare and decreasing medical costs of people with substance abuse disorders is offering incentive payments for healthy behaviors...
Already strained from high levels of burnout and secondary trauma in their normal caregiving activities, nurses are now facing immense Covid-19 related challenges that are likely to increase post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and burnout over the next few years...
In the U.S., nearly half of pregnancies are unintended, and unintended pregnancies occur twice as often among poor women than in the U.S. population overall. The cost of effective contraception may be among the most important determinants of this disparity...
A key mechanism for the perpetuation of poverty across generations is the accumulated developmental deficits of children from deprived backgrounds, who often lack a nurturing and stimulating environment. Moreover, poverty is associated with an incidence of...
Low-income Americans have a higher risk of suffering from common mental illnesses, and lower rates of receiving treatment. More generally, the majority of Americans suffering from common mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety do not receive any...
Jails admit nearly 11 million individuals each year (Subramanian et al., 2015; Zeng, 2019), including a high number of inmates with mental illnesses, infectious diseases, and chronic diseases. Since the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Estelle v. Gamble...
The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is an important part of the safety net for pregnant women. WIC is a large program, covering about half of infants, and WIC participation has multiple health impacts in pregnancy...
Despite widespread public attention to the opioid epidemic and numerous policies to prevent opioid misuse, overdose deaths in the United States increased 16 percent per annum between 2014 and 2017. Public health authorities consider naloxone, a prescription...
Researchers will pilot a randomized evaluation of strategies to facilitate advance directive completion in the over-65 patient population of Providence St. Joseph Health. Despite the significant economic and personal implications of end-of-life health care...
In 2017 the Department of Health and Human Services declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency, and the cost of substance abuse more generally exceeds $500 billion nationally each year. Among the minority of individuals even treated for substance...
Prior research has found that patient-doctor racial concordance is important for increasing the demand for preventive healthcare among low-income African American men, particularly for invasive services. Although results were consistent with better...
We propose a pragmatic, prospective, randomized-controlled trial of Geisinger’s Fresh Food Farmacy (FFF) program. FFF brings a “food-as-medicine” approach to treat food-insecure diabetics featuring a diet prescription filled at an FFF clinic each week—enough...
Secure disposal of unused medications is one strategy to reduce the availability of opioids for diversion or abuse to secondary users after they have been dispensed. Are patients more likely to return unused opioids when informed and incentivized about a...
Incomplete take-up of free and low-cost health insurance remains a puzzle. Failure to enroll in coverage has consequences for the uninsured as well as the health care providers and state budgets that bear the costs of uncompensated care. Moreover, if the...
Reducing racial disparities in health outcomes is a major policy concern in the United States. Although there has been recent progress to close the gap, black men continue to experience earlier morbidity and mortality from preventable and manageable medical...
Bundled payments are a key part of Medicare’s shift away from the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) payment model. We propose to study a nationwide randomized-controlled trial (RCT) of bundled payments for knee and hip replacements that was designed by CMS and...
Combating the rise of the opioid epidemic is a central challenge of US health care policy. A promising approach for improving welfare and decreasing medical costs of people with substance use disorders is offering incentive payments for healthy behaviors. This...
Medical debt is potentially a large burden for many Americans—with 44 million individuals holding an aggregate $75 billion in medical debt. While these nominal amounts are staggering, it is unclear to what extent medical debt harms financial well-being...
In South Carolina, the Medicaid program is administered through Managed Care Organizations (MCOs), which offer different health care plans to Medicaid beneficiaries. These plans differ in their generosity, network coverage, and other attributes, and they are...
Pain is a fundamental symptom that drives healthcare use, including hospital readmissions and patients who are on high levels of opioids have particularly high utilization patterns, including hospital admissions and emergency department visits. Pain...
Workplace wellness programs have become a $6 billion industry and are widely touted as a way to improve employee well-being, reduce health care costs by promoting prevention, and increase workplace productivity. Yet, there is little rigorous evidence available...
While the Affordable Care Act aimed to expand insurance coverage in the United States, insurance take-up rates remain fairly low, and many individuals purchase plans that are sub-optimal for their needs. The success of the health insurance exchanges created by...
Researchers are conducting a pilot study in collaboration with University of Kansas Pediatric Clinic to prepare for a large-scale trial examining the impact of contraceptive counseling for moms at their infants’ pediatric visits on postpartum contraceptive use...
Health care providers’ prices vary substantially within geographies and there is little evidence that higher priced providers deliver higher quality care. With more than 43% of total health care spending estimated to be ‘shoppable’, the savings from improving...
There is enormous policy interest in expanding programs that move beyond traditional health care walls into the community to improve health outcomes – and holding those programs financially responsible for doing so. Billions of public dollars are devoted to...
Abusive prescribing exposes patients to unnecessary health risks and results in wasteful public expenditures. This study will evaluate an innovative approach to fighting abusive prescription: sending letters to suspected inappropriate prescribers warning them...
Cardiovascular diseases are by far the leading causes of death in the United States, with over 800,000 deaths annually. Approximately 1 in 4 Americans with cardiometabolic conditions such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and diabetes experience food insecurity...
Lack of adherence to clinical practice guidelines is an important source of preventable medical errors. Nevertheless, lack of adherence to such guidelines, and clinical error more generally, is widespread in health care delivery today. One potential barrier to...
The Affordable Care Act dramatically expanded the use of regulated marketplaces to provide individuals with health insurance coverage. The efficiency of these marketplaces depends on the ability of consumers to choose plans that reflect their preferences, but...
This study will examine how advance commitment to a commitment contract impacts smoking cessation rates, by affecting the likelihood of taking up a commitment contract. By shifting the decision to start a commitment contract into an earlier time period, the...
Supplemental Security Income (SSI) provides cash payments to the families of 1.3 million low-income children with disabilities who are at risk for poor life outcomes. Available evidence indicates that many SSI families are unaware of the likelihood that...
This pilot randomized controlled trial, conducted in collaboration with Tufts Medical Center, aims to determine whether financial support can increase caregivers’ ability to breastfeed and provide skin-to-skin care to preterm infants. The study team's central...
Inappropriate prescriptions are a rising threat to the health of patients, particularly senior citizens. Overprescription can also increase health care expenditures due to the direct cost of the drugs and the resulting health care use caused by adverse...
There is great public and private interest in the use of employee wellness programs to improve health and lower health care costs, with such programs promoted in the Affordable Care Act and adopted by half of large firms. However, little rigorous evidence...
The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers’ Care Management Program, Link2Care, targets “super-utilizers” of the health care system – specifically adults with two or more hospitalizations in the prior six months and multiple chronic conditions – with...