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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.

Sequencing Two Early Childhood Interventions Back-to-back in India

Britta Augsburg
Jere Behrman
Sally Grantham-McGregor
Angus Phimister
Marta Rubio-Codina
Exposure to poverty very early in life can harm individuals’ cognitive development. Interventions that promote early-life stimulation can counteract these deficits and lay a foundation for success throughout life. Researchers are evaluating the impact of immediately following up an early childhood...

Building Footbridges to Improve Market Access and Agricultural Outcomes in Rwanda

In partnership with Bridges to Prosperity, the researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation across 23 districts in Rwanda to determine the impact of building footbridges on wages and agricultural technology adoption and production.

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.

School's Out: How Summer Youth Employment Programs Impact Academic Outcomes (in Boston)

Researchers evaluated the impact of Boston’s Summer Youth Employment Program, which uses a lottery to provide youth with part-time work and skills training during the summer, on students’ educational outcomes. The program significantly increased high school graduation rates among participating...

Combating Corruption in Community Development in Indonesia

J-PAL affiliate Benjamin Olken (MIT) devised a method to measure corruption and used it to evaluate alternative strategies to reduce corruption on Indonesian roadbuilding projects. The evaluation tested two types of strategies: encouraging community participation and increasing the probability of...

Spousal Control and Intra-Household Decision Making in the Philippines

Researchers designed a field study to identify how information and communication affect intra-household decisions. They found that Filipino spouses who don't control the household spending and savings decisions deposit money into their own accounts in private settings and commit it to consumption...

Encouraging Voters to Pay Attention to Local Development Issues

In order to examine how voter preferences vary with information about the relevance of ethnicity and politician quality, researchers randomly assigned polling stations during the 2007 Uttar Pradesh elections to two information campaigns, one calling for people not to vote for a party simply for...