Researchers partnered with an employer in Addis Ababa to assess the impact of a small monetary incentive to apply for a job or a higher wage offer on the quality of applicants to a vacancy for a clerical position. Both of these changes increased the quality of applicants by similar amounts.

Researchers are partnering with a bank and a mobile money operator in the Dominican Republic to evaluate the impact of credit scoring models designed specifically for women on access to credit.

Researchers partnered with a tea company in Malawi to study the effects of a savings product that allowed workers to defer payment of a part of their wages. The deferred wages program was generally popular and increased savings; in the longer run, it helped workers improve their houses.

Researchers at the Lujeri Tea Estates in Malawi evaluated the impact of exposure to more, less, or equally productive peers on tea harvester productivity. They found that increasing the productivity of a worker’s peers meaningfully increased worker productivity, measured in kilograms of tea picked. This result was driven largely by women, whose productivity gains were much larger than those of men.

This evaluation tested whether offering insurance policies that required enrollment at different group levels mitigated the risk of individuals who are more likely to need health insurance being more likely to purchase policies. When allowed to purchase insurance at the individual level, those most likely to require health care were disproportionately more likely to purchase insurance, but offering policies that required larger groups (such as households) to enroll reduced this effect.

Diarrhea is a leading cause of death in children under the age of 5, but adding small amounts of chlorine into water can treat water and prevent a large number of these deaths. Providing free dispensers for chlorine to treat water reduced under-five mortality. Children living in villages with dilute chlorine solution dispensers were 63 percent less likely to die relative to the comparison group.

Researchers are partnering with the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) to identify barriers to a wider market for consulting and training in Bangladesh by offering high-quality manufacturing training services at randomly-assigned price points and covering different topics. They find that factories and managers are unwilling to take-up high-quality training services more as a result of high production pressures than as a result of high prices, and that there is higher demand for training to improve production planning and quality than for training on human or social resources.

Researchers studied a policy reform in Boston, Massachusetts, that allowed effective charter schools to replicate their school models at new locations. Results showed that charter schools reproduced their effectiveness at new campuses by following similar sets of standardized protocols, demonstrating the feasibility of charter school replication.

Researchers evaluated the effects of introducing price increases during peak periods and also real-time information about electricity usage to residential customers in the United States. Households that received feedback about usage reduced consumption and individuals were more responsive to pricing events that happened with more advance notice.

In Uganda, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of providing a soft skills certificate to both employers and job seekers during job interviews on matching in the labor market. The certificates caused workers to increase their expectations of finding the right job, while high-ability managers were more likely to have a positive assessment of workers’ skills.

Researchers worked with Innovations for Poverty Action, the Liberian Ministry of Education, and the group of eight private operators to conduct a randomized evaluation to assess the effects of outsourcing management of public schools after one and three years.

In this randomized evaluation in Zimbabwe, researchers studied how social media messages targeting misinformation can affect people’s beliefs about and responses toward Covid-19. The study found that these messages increased participants’ knowledge of Covid-19 information by 7 percentage points and reduced potentially harmful behavior, or noncompliance with lockdown guidelines, by 30 percentage points.

To better understand gender inequalities in academic achievement, choice of occupation, and labor market outcomes, researchers studied the effect of teachers’ beliefs about gender roles on student achievement in Istanbul, Turkey. Girls who were taught by teachers with traditional gender views had lower math and verbal test scores, which worsened with longer exposure to their teachers; boys did not experience these effects.

Researchers evaluated the impact of the mandatory-participation bundled payment model for hospitals and explored which hospitals were incentivized to opt in to bundled payments after the model was later made voluntary. The mandatory-participation bundled payment program produced modest reductions in Medicare claims, but the voluntary program produced smaller declines in Medicare claims than if the mandatory program had continued.

What are the impacts of vocational education on labor markets, migration patterns, and health and fertility outcomes in Kenya?