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?
Facility inspections represent a key enforcement practice across regulatory domains, but they are costly, infrequent, and detect only a small fraction of violations. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) typically relies on inspection targeting...
The approximately 7,000 brick kilns in Bangladesh generate 11% of the country’s particulate matter, 22% of black carbon, and 17% of total annual CO2 emissions. The researchers developed an intervention, Zigzag 2.0, which offered brick kiln owners and operators...
Climate change has induced progressive salinization of low-elevated coastal zones in many parts of the world. Bangladesh, in particular, is vulnerable to the effects of climate change due to its geographic proximity to the ocean and low-lying topography...
India has been at the forefront of a movement to replace traditional in-kind or goods subsidies with cash transfers. The immediate benefit of such a change is to reduce leakage: the amount of a benefit that does not reach the beneficiary (Muralidharan, 2016...
West Bengal Accelerated Development of Minor Irrigation Project (WBADMIP) and Precision Development (PxD) are collaborating in piloting successful interventions in promoting the adoption of flood-tolerant rice seeds (FTS). The interventions could enhance the...
Electric vehicles (EVs) could play a critical role in decarbonizing the transportation sector. Decarbonization will only take place, however, if the EVs get their electricity from low- or zero-carbon sources of electricity. In the short-term, an attractive way...
While macro models estimate high migration flows in response to climate change, little is known about why individual households migrate. This project studies the climate-driven migration decisions of ultra-poor agrarian households, who are among the most...
Researchers are collaborating with the Pollution Control Boards (PCBs) of Gujarat and Maharashtra to design and scale emissions markets for air pollutants. The goal of these markets is to reduce the cost of compliance with environmental regulations and reduce...
The 2022 disaster risk global index ranked the Philippines first among 193 countries, illustrating the need for programs to support Filipinos impacted by disasters. The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) distributes emergency cash transfers...
Many countries subsidize electricity to increase access to affordable, reliable energy for people experiencing poverty and encourage shifts towards cleaner energy. Targeting progressive subsidies through electricity systems can be useful in low- and middle...
Despite the enormous health costs of air pollution, willingness-to-pay (WTP) for clean air in highly polluted low-income contexts remains very low. Researchers posit that one significant and understudied reason is that clean air is an experienced good, whose...
A third of Mexico City’s population receives piped water only during limited hours and suffers routine supply interruptions, and about one-tenth receives water less than twice per week. Piped water shortages have increased over time and are projected to worsen...
Weather uncertainty is a significant source of production risks, and is increasingly salient in the context of climate change. Short- to medium-range forecasts could help farmers optimize the timing of agricultural practices, increasing returns to agricultural...
Smallholder farmers are among those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Adoption rates of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices in sub-Saharan Africa, where the twin challenges of food security and poverty are pervasive, remain particularly...
The project evaluates a targeted risk-informed early action pilot in response to floods in Bangladesh, testing efficacy of early warning messaging, timing of cash transfers, and data-driven innovations in targeting approaches. Through a randomized evaluation...
The lack of participative forest regulation and inclusive forest governance have been disincentives for the adoption of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) for natural reforestation. There is currently missing evidence on how FMNR and the role of land...
The majority of households in low- and middle-income countries live in rural areas where markets are poorly integrated and productivity is low. Climate variability, such as rainfall variation, is a key constraint to agricultural productivity. This project will...
Curbing methane emissions is key to addressing climate change, and Colorado is at the forefront of methane regulation in the oil and gas sector. Researchers partnered with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to improve monitoring...
Between 2011-20, floods caused over 45,000 deaths with most occurring in lower-income countries. Early warning systems (EWS) for floods can lower human and economic losses and improve post-flood recovery. But underdeveloped dissemination infrastructure in...
Air pollution is one of the most serious threats to human well-being globally and especially in urban South Asia. As air pollution levels are still rising in many cities, it is important to understand what defensive investments households can make in order to...
Researchers will study Ghana’s Premix Fuel Program, a large conditional transfer program subsidizing premix fuel for fishermen in Ghana. Subsidized fuel is hoarded, creating artificial shortages and prices that defy the program’s spirit. Researchers will...
One of India’s flagship decarbonization programs seeks to shift millions of grid-connected irrigation pumps to run on farmer-owned photovoltaic (PV) panels, while also allowing sales of unused energy to the grid. The program has a large potential to mitigate...
Air pollution has significant negative effects on health and economic outcomes in urban centers of Latin America, and unequal exposure to air pollution may be exacerbating income and health inequalities. Because individuals spend most of their lives indoors...
Irrigation provides a possible means for farmers to adapt to climate change. In the Bundelkhand region of central India, traditional tanks were constructed centuries ago to store rainwater for irrigation later in the season or for cultivation during the dry...
Green Super Rice has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice cultivation, but reaching its effectiveness depends on farmer behavior and the incentives they face. In this pilot study in the Philippines, researchers will develop...
Researchers will design and evaluate a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program to compensate communities in Liberia for conserving collective forestland. PES offers compensation for conserving forests, helping to mitigate climate change without depriving...
The majority of firms in sub-Saharan Africa are small establishments with low productivity and a short lifespan. Electricity is often cited as a key limiting factor of firm productivity growth: access to electricity and reliability of electricity are major...
Migration may be an important component of climate change adaptation, especially for residents of low-income countries. Individuals may migrate away as a coping mechanism in response to unforeseen and sudden environmental shocks, such as droughts, floods, or...
Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada, United States of America
Type:
Path-to-scale project
The objective of this project is to scale and test behavioral interventions that improve household-level demand flexibility in several high-income and high-emission countries. A secondary project objective is to reduce overall household energy demand. More...
Air pollutants, like particulate matter of diameter smaller than 2.5 μm, contribute to a range of adverse outcomes. Exposure to these harmful particulate matter is unequal: low-income families and underrepresented groups experience significantly greater...
Air pollution represents one of the most severe contemporary public health disasters in India. However, there remains a notable absence of public pressure on elected officials to seek policy solutions to improve air quality. In this study, researchers will...
Across South Asia, the brick manufacturing industry is dominated by inefficient, coal-burning kilns. Brick kilns are one of the largest emitters in the region. In Bangladesh, kilns contribute 17 percent of the country’s annual CO2 emissions and 11 percent of...
This project aims to evaluate whether installing air filters inside classrooms enhances student learning. Bogotá has high levels of air pollution which could negatively affect education. Installing air filters (HEPA) could potentially mitigate the harmful...
While high upfront costs limit the adoption of electricity connections, little is known about non-price barriers to adoption. Researchers will aim to fill this gap through a partnership with the Ministry of Energy in Benin, who plans to heavily subsidize grid...
Researchers will embed a village-level randomized evaluation into the ongoing, government-led rollout of the solar irrigation pump (SIP) program in Bangladesh to study how the adoption, usage, and maintenance of SIP technologies are affected by the type of...
South Asia’s energy crisis is increasingly characterized by rising energy demands that remain unmet by the national energy supply, contributing to frequent power outages. Rising energy costs and power cuts pose high risks for low-income entrepreneurial...
Researchers will evaluate and compare two alternative strategies to foster climate change adaptation among the rural poor. In partnership with BRAC, they are studying two new versions of BRAC's flagship Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative, which have been...
Understanding how to design policies to effectively reduce firm-level carbon emissions while minimizing impacts on economic growth is a question of central importance in the battle to mitigate climate change. The European Union is proposing a Carbon Border...
Almost 800 million people in low- and middle-income countries are not connected to the electricity grid. Those with power are often subject to unreliable supply and frequent outages. One reason for this is that utilities are frequently unable to reliably bill...
The ability of governments to expand access to energy runs aground when state capacity is limited. Unpaid bills and electricity theft can create a leaky bucket that results in energy access being curtailed, especially for those experiencing poverty. Together...
Increased access to affordable and high-quality electricity services is needed in many low- and middle-income countries. Raising revenue through electrical bill payments can be key to supporting this goal, and help electricity utilities meet increasing...
Climate change will dramatically alter weather patterns around the world, particularly in developing countries. Farmers in poor countries are currently unable to optimally adapt to the weather. Under climate change, yields are projected to fall substantially...
In situ rainwater-harvesting (RWH) techniques have the potential to increase agricultural yields in the face of low and erratic rainfall, reversing land degradation and combatting desertification. We propose to study the scale-up of an intervention that has...
Transportation generates the largest share of greenhouse gas emissions and is a primary driver of pollution in cities. Given that billions will move into cities in the coming decades within low- and middle-income countries, a key part of the fight to reduce...
The most important environmental issue facing the Dominican Republic (DR) today is the destruction of its coastal mangrove forests. These trees save lives by shielding villages from tropical storm damage, providing a haven for juvenile reef fish, and...
In 2019, India announced it had reached a 100 percent rate of household electrification. Now comes the hard part: providing newly connected households with reliable, high-quality power supply. Many rural areas of India have low-quality and unreliable supply...
Low-income households in the Philippines lack sufficient access to affordable and resilient housing to protect them from the physical and economic damages brought by increasingly frequent extreme weather events, such as typhoons and floods. Researchers will...
Averting the worst impacts of climate change requires immediate government action in wealthy, high-emitting countries like the United States. Today, these policy changes are no longer limited by technical know-how, but rather by a lack of political will. This...
The energy sector in low- and middle-income countries is characterized by two stylized facts: first, high rates of particulate and carbon emissions per unit electricity generated, and second low electricity reliability. To reduce air pollution levels and...
This project seeks to incentivize smallholder farmers in rural India to adopt agricultural practices that improve carbon soil sequestration. The researchers will carry out a pilot scheme that pays farmers as a function of measured improvements in soil organic...
Across low- and middle-income countries, cooking fuel expenditures represent a large share of households’ budgets, crowding out health and educational expenditures. Simultaneously, many rural areas lack the infrastructure to deal with agricultural waste...
Climate change-induced rainfall and temperature variability pose a substantial economic risk to smallholder dairy farmers in low- and middle-income countries. Rainwater harvesting tanks may help farmers adapt to climate uncertainty. Previous work, led by...
India’s increasing prominence in the global economy has been accompanied by hazardous air pollution levels, in part due to the dominance of coal-based power generation. To reduce air pollution levels and increase energy production, the national government has...
Open waste burning emits large quantities of black carbon and co-pollutants, contributing to climate change and impacting human health. Reliable and high-quality waste management services are sparse in many developing countries. Waste management services (WMS)...
Globally, nearly three billion people cook with traditional stoves and fuels. These inefficient and polluting energy sources produce one-quarter of all black carbon emissions globally. Household air pollution also represents the largest energy-related health...
Participatory development emphasizes a bottom-up approach focusing on community control over planning and implementation decisions to improve development outcomes. We propose to assess the value of community participation in the location choice and...
Rapid urbanization is straining electricity grids in many developing countries. Nigeria boasts high connectivity rates, but actual electricity access is much lower—the average electricity connection only functions a third of the time. Many households rely on...
Off-grid renewable energy (RE) solutions can be an environmentally friendly, easy, and more reliable source of energy. Yet, even with access to finance under favorable conditions, few micro, small, and medium enterprises might eventually adopt the new...
Motorcycle taxis provide an important means of transportation and support economic livelihoods across Latin America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, existing moto-taxis are largely petrol-based, with significant negative externalities for both...
The extension of rural electrification can help to improve the capacity of vulnerable communities to adapt to climate change through income diversification and increased productivity. In Rwanda, the Electricity Access Roll-Out Program (EARP) has been...
The production of rice requires flooded fields with massive extraction of groundwater using electricity. Previous research has shown that a simple perforated pipe (called Alternate Wetting and Drying technology) can reduce water use in deep water table areas...
In this project, we partner with a California electric utility to evaluate the welfare impacts of an electric vehicle (EV) load management technology. Electrified transportation is a critical component of global decarbonization plans, beyond reducing...
Across South Asia, the brick manufacturing industry is dominated by inefficient, coal-burning kilns. Brick kilns are one of the largest emitters in the region. In Bangladesh, kilns contribute 17 percent of the country’s annual CO2 emissions and 11 percent of...
Researchers are collaborating with the Punjab State Pollution Control Board (PSPCB) and the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (GPCB) to design, implement, and scale emissions markets for air pollution. The goal of these markets is to reduce the cost of...
Mexico’s national forest protection program, Pago por Servicios Ambientales (PSA), is one of the largest Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs worldwide, but its funding has declined sharply recently. This project aims to study whether the program’s...
The City of Cape Town has an ambitious climate target of net carbon neutrality by 2050. At the same time, the City distributes water and electricity to a growing population, around a quarter of which lives in poverty. The City therefore must balance equitable...
China’s poor environmental performance is not for lack of issuing environmental regulations. Instead, there is a persistent gap between what the central government requires and what local governments implement (Karplus, Zhang, and Almond, 2018). In 2019-2021...
Shipping produces significant greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) along with other harmful pollutants that result in premature deaths and reduce ecosystem services. Based on our analysis of data with the shipping company Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement, we have...
We propose a set of pilot surveys and survey experiments, to be conducted in collaboration with BRAC, to explore the pressing yet understudied area of climate migration. These surveys will study the demand for a BRAC-designed climate migration program, and...
Between 2011-20, floods caused over 45,000 deaths with most occurring in lower-income countries (Guha-Sapir, 2020). Early warning systems (EWS) for floods can lower human and economic losses and improve post-flood recovery. But, underdeveloped dissemination...
This project will conduct a randomized control trial on the determinants of adoption of an energy-efficient technology in the Bangladeshi manufacturing sector. The technology is a new motor for stitching machines, called a “servo” motor, which uses about 75%...
The government of Paraguay and FAO Paraguay will implement a large-scale conditional cash transfer program for smallholder farmers in the Eastern part of Paraguay, as part of the “Poverty, Reforestation, Energy and Climate Change Project” (PROEZA). The cash...
Deforestation is a first-order policy concern in developing countries like India along with a lack of adequate resources among owners of forest land, causing a vicious cycle of deforestation and poverty. Payment for ecosystem services (PES) for prevention of...
India is plagued with the twin problems of exceedingly high levels of air pollution and low access to electricity. To address these issues, India plans to dramatically scale electricity capacity in conventional and renewable resources. To fully harness the...
Groundwater is a vital input to agricultural production worldwide, but a widespread lack of marginal pricing or other effective regulation often leads to misallocation, overconsumption, and depletion. As precipitation and surface water supplies become scarcer...