Without adaptation—defined broadly as “preparing for and responding to the disruptive effects of climate change,” it is predicted that 500 million small farms around the world will experience severe impacts on agricultural yields, affecting their income, food security, and well-being.

As 2019 comes to a close, we reflect back on key accomplishments, lessons learned, and the partnerships that have made it possible to advance J-PAL North America’s mission of reducing poverty in the region. From compelling new evidence and reviews of over 160 rigorous evaluations, to the Evaluation...

In recent years, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) redesigned the reminder notification letters that now reach more than 360,000 individuals eligible for the earned income tax credit (EITC), giving them millions of dollars in earned benefits. This change was in response to a...

This article was originally published in The Center for Effective Philanthropy. Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer recently won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” But while attention has focused on their experimental...

At the start of a new year, many people around the world set resolutions to improve their lives over the course of the year: to eat healthier food, to be kinder, and to quit smoking, to name just a few. Many resolutions are bound to fade over time—one common statistic claims that only 8 percent of...

The digital financial services (DFS) sector is among the fastest-growing: the number of financial technology (“fintech”) companies in Indonesia more than doubled from 130 in 2017 to more than 320 in 2019. In addition to this rapid growth in the private sector, the Indonesian government is...

Tanya joined J-PAL South Asia’s policy team after receiving a master’s degree in public policy from the Paris School of Economics. At J-PAL South Asia, she played a key role in an early partnership with the Government of Tamil Nadu and helped lay the conceptual groundwork for important program scale...

Kristen joined J-PAL in 2017 to lead the Creating Moves to Opportunity project, an influential research partnership between J-PAL affiliated researchers and public housing authorities in the United States. Now the chief operating officer at Opportunity Insights, Kristen shares some reflections on...

In 2019 we launched new initiatives to spur innovative research, admitted the first-ever cohort of blended Masters’ students, celebrated our founders’ and affiliate’s Nobel Prize win, and much more. It’s almost impossible to capture the breadth and depth of what our staff, affiliates, and partners...

2019 was a banner year for J-PAL on many fronts. We launched many exciting initiatives to expand the frontiers of research and evidence-informed policy, including in digital finance (Africa), government innovation (global), migrants and social inclusion (Europe), work of the future (North America)...

We are pleased to announce the publication of two new methods guides to de-identifying and publishing research data. These guides draw on J-PAL’s experience of publishing research data on randomized evaluations in the social sciences for more than a decade. They provide practical advice for students...

Creating good policies is a complex and dynamic process. A program can be evaluated, found to improve people’s lives, and be scaled up. However, in the longer run, these programs interact with other policies, contexts change, and policymakers are in constant need of new information and evidence to...

When a study is not published in an academic journal, how can we ensure its results, even null results, are still reported—instead of remaining inaccessible in a (metaphorical) file drawer?