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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.

Digital Marketing for Microenterprises and Small Businesses in Egypt

Researchers aim to identify which firms can benefit from engaging with and advertising on digital advertising platforms, to explore the reasons why they may not already be doing so, and to test whether input-based versus results-based approaches are most cost-effective for policy.

Limiting Learning Loss using Phone-based Programming during Covid-19 in Botswana

Noam Angrist
Caton Brewster
Moitshepi Matsheng
Working in Botswana, researchers rapidly evaluated a phone-based remote learning program aimed at keeping children engaged with math during the Covid-19 pandemic. Students who received weekly SMS messages and phone calls to review math exercises increased their math skills after twelve weeks, while...

De-biasing Over-Optimism about Covid-19 Risks to Limit Vulnerable Individuals' Risky Behavior in India

Researchers are evaluating the impact of providing different types of information about the health risks of Covid-19 on individuals’ risky behavior among diabetic and hypertensive individuals in Tamil Nadu, India, with special attention to de-biasing over-optimism about personal health risk.

Impact of Community Information in Identifying High Ability Microentrepreneurs

Identifying high-potential microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to lack of verifiable information. Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the value of community knowledge in identifying high-potential microentrepreneurs.

Providing Conditional Cash Transfers to Encourage Childhood Immunization in Pakistan

Sara Abdullah
Danya Arif
Subhash Chandir
Aamir Khan
In Pakistan, researchers conducted an evaluation to test the impact of different types of mobile conditional cash transfers (mCCTs) on childhood immunization coverage and timeliness. Overall, small mCCTs led to increases in rates of immunization coverage at a low administrative cost. Additionally...

Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods in Indonesia

To examine these issues, researchers randomly assigned 49 villages in Indonesia to choose local infrastructure projects through either a direct election or a representative-based meeting. Choosing local infrastructure projects by direct election, rather than through representatives, had a small...

The Role of Incentives in the Distribution of Public Goods in Zambia

In Lusaka, Zambia, researchers compared the effect of financial and non-financial reward schemes on sales of female condoms. They found that non-financial incentives were more effective than financial rewards at motivating hair stylists to sell female condoms to their customers.

Improving Third-Party Audits and Regulatory Compliance in India

Researchers evaluated the impact of a reform to the pollution audit system in India, making auditors more independent, on the truthfulness of their reporting and the behavior of the firms they audited. Increasing their independence made them more likely to report the truth about industrial plants’...