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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.

Group Lending versus Individual Lending in Mongolia

Britta Augsburg
Emla Fitzsimons
Ralph De Haas
Heike Harmgart
Researchers compared the impacts of providing group- or individual-liability loans to women in rural Mongolia. Access to group loans increased business ownership and food consumption among poor women, while individual loans had no effect on these outcomes.

Using Deliberative Electoral Strategies to Overcome Clientelism in Benin

Town hall meetings in Benin reduced the ability of the most popular presidential candidate in that village to garner political support using clientelist tactics, and still appear to be effective for motivating people to attend the polls.

Evaluating the Impact of Moving to Opportunity in the United States

Emma Adam
Paul Hirschfield
Ronald C. Kessler
Jeffrey Kling
Stacy Tessler Lindau
Thomas W. McDade
Joshua C. Pinkston
Lisa Sanbonmatsu
Robert C. Whitaker
Helping families with young children living in high-poverty housing projects to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods improves the later-life outcomes for the children and may reduce the intergenerational persistence of poverty.

Are Information Disclosures Effective in the Credit Card Market? Evidence from Mexico

Alan Elizondo
Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg
Researchers tested the effect of seven different information disclosure messages on credit card clients of a large Mexican bank and found that non-standard information disclosures reduced debt levels and lowered delinquency more effectively than legally mandated disclosures.

Informal Math Games to Improve Children's Readiness for Learning School Mathematics in India

By the time they reach primary school, disadvantaged children often lag behind their more advantaged peers in the skills and concepts of formal math. To address this issue, researchers examined the impact of math games, played in preschools and exercising early emerging, universal and intuitive...

Testing Commitment Devices for Remittances among Filipino Migrants in Rome

Giuseppe De Arcangelis
Majlinda Joxhe
David McKenzie
Erwin Tiongson
Researchers evaluated the impact of enabling Filipino migrants to label remittances for education on the amount of money they sent home. Labeling remittances as funds to be used for education raised the amount of money migrants sent home substantially (over 15 percent).

The Impact of Poverty Reduction on Child Health, Nutrition, and Sleep in the United States

Nathan Fox
Sarah Halpern-Meekin
Emma Hart
Alicia Kunin-Batson
Katherine Magnuson
Kimberly Noble
Jessica Sperber
Hiro Yoshikawa
To understand the causal impact of poverty reduction on children’s health, nutrition, sleep, and healthcare utilization, among other outcomes, researchers randomly assigned new mothers to receive an unconditional cash transfer of $333 (high-cash group) or $20 per month (low-cash group) in the Baby’s...