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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.

Discrimination in the Job Market in the United States

Researchers examined the level of racial discrimination in the United States labor market by randomly assigning identical résumés black-sounding or white-sounding names and observing the impact on requests for interviews from employers. Results found that résumés with white-sounding names received...

Project Generasi: Conditional Community Block Grants in Indonesia

Junko Onishi
Susan Wong
Researchers partnered with the Government of Indonesia to evaluate the impact of community block grants and the additional effect of performance incentives. They found that community block grants improved health and education in Indonesian villages, and adding performance incentives sped up...

Graduating the Ultra-Poor in Peru

Bram Thuysbaert
Researchers evaluated a multi-faceted approach aimed at improving long term income of the ultra-poor in Peru. They found that the approach had long-lasting economic and self-employment impacts and that the long-run benefits, measured in terms of household expenditures, outweighed their up-front...

School Libraries and Language Skills in Indian Primary Schools: A Randomized Evaluation of the Akshara Library Program

Evan Borkum
Fang He
Researchers partnered with the Akshara Foundation in Bangalore, India to evaluate the impact of hiring trained librarians in primary schools on students’ academic achievement. Overall, the intervention had little effect on students' language, math, and science skills and had no impact on student...

Discrimination in Grading in India

Researchers used a randomized evaluation to test for discrimination in grading in India. They found that teachers gave exams that were assigned to be lower caste worse scores than those that were assigned to be high caste.

Meet Your Future – The Effect of Mentoring Ugandan Vocational Students on Employment and Earnings

Livia Alfonsi
Mary Namubiru
Sara Spaziani
In Uganda, researchers introduced a mentoring program to evaluate the impact of interactions between young, successful vocational training graduates and current vocational training students on their employment status and earnings. Students who received mentoring were more likely to be working three...

Promoting Sustainable Farming Practices in Malawi

Ariel BenYishay
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of leveraging social networks to disseminate information about two technologies, pit planting and “Chinese composting,” on farmers’ adoption of these methods. Providing performance-based incentives to peer farmers had the biggest...

Providing Sexual and Reproductive Health Advice via SMS in Uganda

This evaluation tested whether increasing access to information about sexual and reproductive health via a text message service could reduce rates of risky behavior. The new text message service did not have a measurable impact on health knowledge, but led people to perceive the risks associated...