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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.

Empowering women through mobile money in Tanzania

Empowering women not only has the potential to improve their lives, but also their children's health and education. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and BRAC, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test whether encouraging women to make weekly loan repayments...

Public Recognition and Fundraising in the United States

Researchers used two randomized evaluations to identify whether the motive for giving in public can be primarily linked to a desire for prestige (the “image” effect) or a hope that a public gift will influence others (the “signal” effect). They found that a desire to improve social image largely...

Innovative Finance for Technology Adoption in Western Kenya

Researchers randomly evaluated whether well-timed access to credit would allow maize farmers in Kenya to make better use of storage and sell their output at higher prices. The loan offers allowed farmers to store more maize and earn higher revenues, with larger revenue impacts for farmers granted...

The Impact of Job Networks on Women's Recruitment in Malawi

Researchers introduced a recruitment drive for a firm in Malawi to evaluate the impact of referral-based hiring on women’s employment at the company. Results from the randomized evaluation indicate that men systematically referred fewer women, and women’s referral of other qualified women was not...

Channeling Remittances to Education in El Salvador

Kate Ambler
Diego Aycinena
Researchers found that subsidizing Salvadoran migrants’ remittances for education increased spending on education and attendance at private schools for their female relatives in El Salvador.

Increasing Women’s Local Political Participation Through Top-Down and Bottom-Up Training in Indonesia

A researcher evaluated the impact of empowerment training for female citizens and training for male council chairs on women's participation in neighborhood associations, known as rukun tetangga (RT) in Malang, East Java, Indonesia.

Partisan Mail and Voter Turnout in the United States

Matthew Green
Through a randomized evaluation, researchers examined the effects of partisan mail campaigns on voter turnout in state and municipal elections in Connecticut and New Jersey. Results indicate that partisan direct mail campaigns do little to stimulate voter turnout.

The Impact of Offering Free ATM Cards to Couples in Kenya

In partnership with Family Bank of Kenya, researchers evaluated the impact of providing free ATM card to couples on savings account use. Providing ATM cards significantly increased the use of savings accounts owned by men and joint accounts on average, but had no effect on accounts owned by women or...