Blog

News

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 Demand for Status Goods in Indonesia

Working with a large bank in Indonesia that markets platinum credit cards to high-income customers, researchers designed a series of randomized evaluations to understand the demand for status goods. Overall, researchers found that a substantial part of the demand for the platinum card is explained...

Providing Endowments to Improve Bargaining Outcomes for Microentrepreneurs in Ghana

Gisella Kagy
Lena Song
Researchers randomly provided more or less cash to garment-making firm owners in Ghana before a bargaining game to evaluate the impact of endowment on the negotiated sale price of a good. Owners of garment-making microenterprises with lower household liquidity agreed to lower sale prices during the...

Testing Alternative Job Evaluation Schemes to Improve Civil Servants’ Work Performance in China

Employers often rely on subjective performance evaluations by supervisors to gauge the performance of workers–particularly in the public sector, where civil servants’ work performance is hard to measure. However, relying on the opinions of local supervisors could cause subordinates to prioritize...

The Effects of a Universal Basic Income during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Kenya

Michael Faye
Alan Krueger
Taking advantage of a pre-existing large-scale evaluation of a universal basic income project in Kenya, researchers measured how different types of cash transfers impact recipients’ income, reported well-being, food security, mental health, and social interaction in the context of the COVID-19...

Improving Youth Employment through Job Training and Capital in Egypt

Ahmed Elsayed
Kevin Hempel
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to determine the impact of job training and counseling programs on youth employment in Egypt. The job training programs improved labor market outcomes such as employment rates and income, and sometimes had a positive impact on non-labor market outcomes...

Addressing Bias by Promoting Women to Management Positions in Bangladesh

Researchers randomly assigned co-supervisors to production lines to evaluate the impact of exposing garment factory workers and supervisors to women managers on factory productivity, supervisor retention, and attitudes toward women. Several months after the intervention, there was no difference in...

The Impact of Poverty Reduction on Child Health, Nutrition, and Sleep in the United States

Nathan Fox
Sarah Halpern-Meekin
Emma Hart
Alicia Kunin-Batson
Katherine Magnuson
Kimberly Noble
Jessica Sperber
Hiro Yoshikawa
To understand the causal impact of poverty reduction on children’s health, nutrition, sleep, and healthcare utilization, among other outcomes, researchers randomly assigned new mothers to receive an unconditional cash transfer of $333 (high-cash group) or $20 per month (low-cash group) in the Baby’s...