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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.

The Impact of Free Tuition Program Design on College Applications and Enrollment in the United States

Elizabeth Burland
Katherine Michelmore
Stephanie Owen
Shwetha Raghuraman
Researchers investigated how two different free tuition programs for low-income students affected application and enrollment to the University of Michigan. An unconditional offer substantially increased application and enrollment while a conditional offer had a much smaller effect on applications...

Improving Third-Party Audits and Regulatory Compliance in India

Researchers evaluated the impact of a reform to the pollution audit system in India, making auditors more independent, on the truthfulness of their reporting and the behavior of the firms they audited. Increasing their independence made them more likely to report the truth about industrial plants’...

Information Provision via Mobile Phones to Increase Mobile Banking in Ghana

Researchers partnered with Opportunity International Savings and Loans Limited (OISL) to conduct a randomized evaluation to test the impact of high-frequency interactive voice response (IVR) calls on people’s use of mobile banking services and their financial behaviors in Ghana. People who received...

Small and Medium Enterprise Financing and Mentoring Services in Emerging Markets in the Dominican Republic

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation with a bank in the Dominican Republic to compare the impact of two distinct programs: standard accounting training versus a simplified, rule-of-thumb training that taught basic financial heuristics.

Reducing Barriers to Savings in Rural Malawi

Lasse Brune
Xavier Giné
Researchers analyzed the effect of reducing barriers to saving in rural Malawi on savings behavior, investment in agricultural inputs, and consumption. They found that farmers with access to formal savings accounts preserved greater amounts of savings throughout both the harvest and planting seasons...

Recruiting and Motivating Community Health Workers in Zambia

The Government of Zambia partnered with researchers to test the effect of two different recruitment strategies for a newly created healthcare position, the Community Health Assistant (CHA). One strategy emphasized career opportunities and the other emphasized the contributions one could make in the...

Conditional Cash Transfers in Honduras

Researchers analyzed the effects of a small conditional cash transfer for education in Honduras on school enrollment and child labor.