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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.

Formal Rainfall Insurance for the Informally Insured in India

Mark Rosenzweig
Researchers evaluated how informal insurance within Indian sub-castes affects the demand for formal rainfall insurance, and subsequent risk-taking among households employed in agriculture. Informal insurance both increased and decreased the demand for formal rainfall insurance, depending on the...

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment in the United States

Heidi Allen
Mira Bernstein
Jonathan Gruber
Joseph P. Newhouse
Eric Schneider
Jae Song
Bill Wright
Alan Zaslavsky

Chess Training and Skills Development for Primary School Students in Bangladesh

Researchers in rural Bangladesh introduced a thirty-hour chess training program for grade 5 students to evaluate the impact of chess training on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, such as math scores, risk taking, patience, attention, and creativity. While the chess program had an unclear effect...

The Impact of Delayed Wage Payments on Spending and Investment in Malawi

Lasse Brune
Qingxiao Li
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of paying workers on a weekly basis or in one lump sum, as well as of receiving payments in contexts with greater temptation to spend, on their spending and investment decisions. Workers assigned to receive lump-sum wages were more...

Using Agronomic Trials in Kenya to Learn about Farmers’ Learning

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in western Kenya to test how farmer participation in agronomic trials impacted their experimentation on their own farms with different input combinations and impacted their use of high-quality inputs, yields, adoption of new crops, and profitability...