J-PAL North America, based at MIT, leads J-PAL’s work in the North America region. J-PAL North America conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs.

Our work spans a wide range of sectors including health care, housing, criminal justice, education, and economic mobility. We leverage research by affiliated professors from universities across the continent and a full-time staff of researchers, policy experts, and administrative professionals to generate and disseminate rigorous evidence about which anti-poverty social policies work and why.

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Blog

Nurturing the null: Leveraging unexpected null results to improve case management for housing services

Kimberly Dodds, homeless prevention program manager in King County, Washington, discusses her experience discovering that their program had null results and how they were used to improve the Youth Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative.

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Blog

Nurturing the null: Preparing for null results to bolster evidence use

Null results—finding no impact—can be particularly difficult for researchers, policymakers, and service providers to act on. In this blog post, we share three key considerations for successfully designing studies and acting on null results.

Five headshots of the blog authors. Top row starting from the left: Damon Jones, Laura Feeney, Matt Notowidigdo. Bottom row starting from the left: Shanyce Campbell, Sule Alan.
Blog

Exploring the role of positionality in economics research

J-PAL North America convened a small group of researchers to ask how we might consider positionality within a quantitative research setting.

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Update

October 2024 North America Newsletter

J-PAL North America's October newsletter features an updated version of our Health Care Delivery Initiative Evidence Wrap-Up, a new video on our work with housing choice vouchers, and a blog on positionality statements in economics research.