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?
Good managers are important for both worker satisfaction as well as for enabling workers to achieve higher productivity, and as a result, earn higher wages. However, identifying good managers, both among candidates at the time of hiring and among incumbents...
Microentrepreneurs around the world utilize informal credit at exorbitant interest rates. Many of these entrepreneurs have access to, but do not utilize microfinance because the timing of their cash flows does not match the microfinance repayment schedules. We...
This project compares two entrepreneurial mindset training interventions (personal initiative training and effectuation training) in their capacity to support the self-sustenance of Rohingya refugees in the Kutupalong refugee camp. It is the first project that...
The authors' previous work has documented significant gender gaps in application and hiring patterns using evidence from online labor markets in Africa. Women tend to be more qualified, by education, for the jobs they apply to than men, but less qualified, by...
We propose an experiment to study the welfare and labor market impacts of expanding job-displacement insurance in Ethiopia. A large ready-made garment factory in the Hawassa Industrial Park will lay off around 2,000 workers by end of July 2022. As is common in...
Youth unemployment is a major policy problem in Sub-Saharan Africa. Apprenticeships are a promising avenue to address youth unemployment as they provide relevant occupational skills training and work experience in the private sector. In this project we propose...
Cape Town and Stellenbosch (Western Cape), South Africa
Type:
Project development grant
The growth and success of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMMSEs) has been pivotal in advancing economic and social development for many low- and middle-income countries. While gains have been achieved in unlocking the potential of SMMEs in South Africa...
In Tanzania, 11.8 percent of youth are unemployed, and most are female. It is estimated that about 400,000 youth enter the labor market annually to compete for only 40,000 jobs created in the economy. Existing evidence shows that youth lacks formal employment...
In the post COVID-19 era, Uganda will rely on the capacity of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) to re-start growth. Supporting SMEs to grow and gain scale is therefore central to both government and the private sector. However, SMEs face two main types...
Does facilitation of international remote work have potential as an economic development intervention? For job-seekers in low- or middle-income countries, the international remote job market offers the prospect of a much larger pool of potential jobs at...
Social networks are an important source of information about the labour market, but in South Africa they are deeply unequal in the quality of information they provide due to network assortativity – the clustering of labour market participants into groups with...
This study uses the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Nigeria as suitable settings to experimentally test several features of job search and job matching services in low-income countries designed to reduce the costs associated with labor market frictions...
Ashaiman-Greater Accra Region, Kasoa-Central Region, Kumasi-Ashanti Region
Type:
Project development grant
Youth unemployment is a major problem facing most low- and middle-income countries including Ghana. In Ghana, youth unemployment is beginning to take an upward trajectory from 8.9 to 9.4 percent from 2019 to 2020 due to limited skills needed to secure jobs. As...
As economies have suffered from volatile economic cycles, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, enhancing employment opportunities among the youth has taken center stage in development policy discussions in low- and middle-income countries, especially in sub...
In collaboration with Chile’s largest microfinance institution, we will experimentally evaluate the impact of two interventions aimed to increase the livelihoods of small business owners in Chile. The first is a flexible, personalized credit product that...
While the economic effects of digitization in low- and middle-income countries have been studied extensively, the general equilibrium effects of digitizing business payments along the supply chain and on neighboring businesses have been less explored. In this...
The impact of the mental health of an employer on firm performance is a policy-relevant topic. Several studies show that poor mental health is related to negative labor outcomes. Although there is also a long history of research that focuses on employees'...
Remote hiring and work has the potential to expand the set of labor market opportunities across geographies, and disproportionately benefit workers traditionally underemployed in their local labor markets (such as those in remote areas, or those preferring...
Labor market indicators for youth in Kenya are worse than those for individuals aged 25 to 64 years. For example, the unemployment rate amongst the Kenyan youth aged 15 to 24 years is 13% compared to 5.1% for those aged 25 to 64 years. Although aggregate labor...
Evidence on the impact of childcare in limiting female labor market participation in the East African region is still scanty and limited to single case studies. In this project, we propose to investigate the extent of the constraints imposed by childcare...
Business entrepreneurs in general are prone to a myriad of challenges- poor infrastructure, poor business climate, inadequate access to financing, political instability/conflicts, effects of climate change, among others. Women entrepreneurs however tend to...
The ongoing use of inefficient cook stoves in rural Benin imposes time and health burdens on women, constraining their labor market participation. This situation prevents the attainment of gender and related labor market outcomes. The introduction of improved...
Youth unemployment is a pervasive global problem. In Malawi, one third of unemployed youth remain jobless for more than 2 years. The most important youth employment barriers include information frictions and limited job-search abilities among young people...
The strong performance of Ghana's economy over the last two decades has not resulted in job creation and improvements in employment conditions, especially among youth. Among the factors that influence unemployment in Ghana, inadequate access to education...
In Saudi Arabia, younger men are becoming more progressive and more accepting of having a wife who works outside the home for pay. However, the family backgrounds and upbringings of young women may have conditioned them to believe otherwise. Such pressures may...
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is characterized by historically low female labor force participation. Morocco is among the few countries that have recorded a sustained drop, from 26.3 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2019. Even conditional on...
The characteristics of internet-mediated gig work–the ability to work from home, at flexible hours, with relatively little training–suggest it may be well-suited to facilitate labor force participation for women who would otherwise be excluded. This randomized...
In this project, we intend to leverage a sample of the universe of all garment-making firm owners in a single district capital in Ghana, to ask a seemingly naïve question: Why don't small firms merge? Our research team has conducted data collection with this...
Despite living in high-density cities, job seekers with low-incomes might only be familiar with a small number of urban locations. We show that underemployed casual workers in Kibera, Nairobi only search for work in a small subset among all nearby locations...
Women's participation in the labor market has declined between 2008 and 2018, with a higher proportional drop in West Africa due to several factors, including the burden of unpaid childcare (IDRC, 2020). Childcare services, one of the policy levers that could...
This project asks whether business relocation within the city can increase profits for microentrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, and if so, then which frictions constrain a firm’s ability to relocate without intervention. In a pilot study of mobile, low capital...
Can connecting women in rural areas to urban markets through digital finance and e-commerce create and sustain market linkages? Can it improve women’s socio-economic outcomes? We will pilot an intervention that employs digital connectivity to overcome spatial...
Development programming typically seeks to promote “development-in-place” and minimize migration – bringing investment and jobs to people, rather than facilitating mobility. This approach overlooks pull factors that draw individuals out of rural areas and push...
Driving a motorcycle taxi is a ubiquitous occupation in many East and West African cities. Nigeria and Kenya have an estimated eight and two million drivers respectively - four percent of each country’s total population. Minimal barriers to entry explain the...
This project is intended to study Saudi female job seekers’ preferences and attitudes towards employment decisions. Ultimately, the aim is to study the internal household dynamics that shape the mentality of Saudi women and consequently affect their labor...
We propose to study the long-term impacts (8-year follow-up) of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program implemented at scale as a two-arm RCT among Ugandan youth. SEED is an innovative in-residence 3-week mini-MBA program modeled...
In this project we propose to examine the long-term impact of a randomized government-sponsored apprenticeship program in Ghana. In 2013, the Ghanaian government launched the National Apprenticeship Programme (NAP), which was targeted at youth who are unable...
Female labor force participation in rural India has declined since the early 2000s, likely due to a combination of norms and job mismatch–in particular, lack of access to part-time work and work outside of agriculture. Recent declines in the cost of...
Through their networks, entrepreneurs in low- to middle-income countries have the opportunity to access valuable financial and informational resources. Many entrepreneurs appear to forego those benefits and prefer to hide their economic activities from their...
Low and irregular labor force participation, high labor turnover and absenteeism are major impediments to productivity in poor countries. We hypothesize that workers have difficulty providing regular labor supply in the formal sector because they lack the...
This project studies how different types of skills training programs increase resilience to the economic shock caused by Covid-19. We build on an existing RCT, which evaluates the impacts of vocational training and on-the-job training on youth employment in...
This project addresses the business location choice of physically mobile, low capital microentrepreneurs, such as street vendors and motorcycle taxi drivers, in Kampala, Uganda. More than 50 percent of Kampala’s businesses are microfirms and their owners are...
National cohesion and labor productivity are two central issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana’s National Service Scheme (NSS) is an ambitious government program intended to address both, while also providing the labor required for completing national...
When businesses hire employees, “the vast majority of microenterprises have no employees outside the owner’s family”.Most economists understand the propensity to hire relatives as arising from contracting frictions and missing information markets...
As youth in low-income countries move towards urban areas in search of off-farm jobs, they often enter the urban informal labor markets (Beegle and Bundervoet, 2019), either as self-employed or as waged daily laborers. Waged casual jobs are typically short and...
We are asking for top-up funding for an existing (J-PAL JOI and PEDL funded) experiment that randomizes emergency job retention financial assistance to firms and workers to estimate impacts for firm survival, worker-firm match survival, and labor market...
We pilot a project designed to unpack the effects of a major labor reform in Mexico on employment in firms. Previous work shows a large gap between the de jure and de facto costs to firms (and benefits to workers) of the employment separation part of Mexico's...
This research implements a field experiment in Ghana to identify potential policies that can support the growth of female-owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We investigate the effects of an exogenous expansion of female professional networks and...
Developing country labor markets are often inefficient, with relatively long search durations, low-quality matches between firms’ needs and workseekers’ skills, and high turnover. Existing evidence shows that generating new information about workseekers’...
We will run a pilot survey study and exploratory fieldwork that will help us design the randomized evaluation of a large-scale youth employment program in Ethiopia. The program will offer low-skill youths training in general skills, an apprenticeship with an...
Many governments and international institutions are working to create economic opportunities for refugees in prolonged crises. Yet refugees, especially in developing countries, may find it particularly hard to access local job markets. By exploring the Ugandan...
While a majority of workers in low-income countries are own-account, a sizable share are wage employed in informal firms. Does the logic of firm assistance and job retention programs in the formal sector apply to firms and wage employees in the informal sector...
This study aims to assess the short- and medium-term impact of Covid-19 on a particularly vulnerable and large but difficult to reach population in India: temporary migrants. Building on a sample of urban migrants from a previous study, we will conduct phone...
Nationwide lockdowns and social distancing strategies in response to COVID-19 threaten the daily operations of small businesses, undermining a critical--and often only--source of daily income for vulnerable populations. Sudden economic hardship, psychosocial...
The Coronavirus pandemic does not only impose a global health threat but is also accompanied by an economic shutdown in many countries. Such a shock poses a particularly large risk for the poor in developing countries who often have highly vulnerable income...
The economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis in Latin America hinges on the survival of SMEs, which employ a large fraction of the region’s workforce. Governments are responding with large economic stimulus packages, including liquidity or methods to prop up...
This study will deliver cash grants to female microenterprise owners in Dandora, Kenya during the COVID-19 outbreak. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the impact of unconditional cash transfers on economic outcomes both during and after the...
We are conducting a series of phone surveys to study the economic, social and security impacts of COVID-19 among informal sector vendors in Lagos, Africa’s largest city with a population of more than 24 million. The survey capitalizes on prior work with a...
With over 200,000 migrants returning to Bihar in the wake of COVID-19 outbreak and a nationwide shutdown, our project works with the Government of Bihar's COVID-19 Response Team to support a rapid policy response. Specifically, we will be conducting high...