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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.

Leveraging Technology to Incentivize Student Effort in India

Using a technology-based math curriculum, researchers evaluated the impact of different incentive types—rewarding continuous effort in the classroom versus rewarding test performance—on student learning. Results indicate that effort-based incentives can be a more effective and cost-effective way of...

Delegating Property Tax Collection to Local Elites in the DRC

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation during the 2018 property tax collection campaign to test the impact of delegating tax collection to local chiefs. Where local chiefs collected taxes, households were more tax compliant than where state collectors collected, mainly because chiefs had...

Comparing Cash and Mobile Transfers in Niger

Rachid Boumnijel
Amanda McClelland
Niall Tierney
In partnership with Concern Worldwide, researchers examined the relative effectiveness of traditional versus mobile cash transfers in Niger. Households who received electronic transfers had more diverse diets than those who received traditional cash transfers, in part due to time savings and shifts...

Scaling Up an Entrepreneurial Model of Community Health Delivery in Uganda

Millions of children die from preventable diseases every year, primarily in low-income countries. In rural Uganda, researchers are working with Innovations for Poverty Action to evaluate the impact on child mortality of an at-scale community health worker program based on a micro-franchise business...

The Impact of a Workplace Wellness Program in Illinois

Researchers evaluated the effects of a large-scale workplace wellness program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on employee health behaviors, self-reported health status, productivity, and total medical expenditures. The researchers found that financial incentives increased...

Mobilizing Local Leaders to Rebuild the Social Compact in Pakistan

Researchers will investigate whether mobilizing local political leaders to strengthen the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizens’ willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and ultimately revitalize the social compact.

The Role of Reference Letters and Skill Accreditation in the South African Labour Market

Employers in the low-skill and entry-level job market often lack information on job seekers’ abilities, which can reduce interview invitations and job offers for job seekers, especially for disadvantaged groups such as women. Researchers partnered with the South African Department of Labour to...

Letters of Recommendation for Youth Employment in the United States

Researchers partnered with SYEP employers to create personalized letters of recommendation for SYEP participants to evaluate the impact of recommendation letters on participants’ educational and employment outcomes after the program. Youth who received the letter of recommendation saw a 3 percentage...