Blog

News

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.

Digital Monitoring and Health Service Provision in Sierra Leone

In many countries, rural populations access social services through decentralized systems that hire community-based workers with high monitoring needs, leaving little time for supervisors to perform other essential functions. Researchers are evaluating the impact of a phone-based e-monitoring app...

Pay for Perfomance Incentives for Heathcare Workers in Pakistan

James Andreoni
Karrar Jaffar
Charles Sprenger
Polio is endemic in Pakistan, and vaccination campaigns often suffer when government health workers hired to administer the vaccine underperform. Researchers introduced individualized bonus contracts to health workers to evaluate the impact of time preferences on vaccine delivery and quality of...

Charitable Giving by Corporations and Aristocrats in Germany

Researchers partnered with the Bavarian State Opera House to conduct a randomized evaluation to test the impact of different fundraising methods on the giving behavior of aristocrats and corporations. They found that aristocrats were more responsive than other donor types but corporations gave the...

Disseminating Innovative Resources and Technologies to Smallholders in Ghana (DIRTS)

Mathias Fosu
Shashidhara Kolavalli
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of access to rainfall insurance either coupled with or compared to tailored extension advice, weather forecasts, and improved access to inputs on intensity of land cultivation and earnings for farmers. Preliminary results show that...

Remedial Education to Address Learning Gaps in Secondary Schools in India

Anne Fitzpatrick
Khandker Wahedur Rahman
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of an in-school remedial education program on student learning in Odisha, India. Both the standard and a version that allowed teacher flexibility improved student test scores without reducing grade- level mastery or affecting the...

Default Effects and Follow-On Behavior: Evidence From An Electricity Pricing Program

Researchers partnered with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District in California to evaluate the effects of a variety of enrollment schemes in time-varying pricing plans on electricity consumption. Results show that households which were enrolled in time-varying pricing plans by default tended to...

Celebrity Twitter endorsement for an immunization public health campaign in Indonesia

Vivi Alatas
Markus Mobius
Cindy Paladines
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation on measuring the impact of celebrity Twitter endorsement for a child immunization campaign on the public’s opinion and behavior towards immunization. Celebrity endorsement increased Twitter engagement with the immunization campaign, primarily when...