Our mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. We do this through research, policy outreach, and training.
J-PAL Director Esther Duflo teamed up with psychologists and the education NGO Pratham to evaluate an education intervention based on cognitive science for preschool children in Delhi, India.
The estimated impacts of charter schools have varied widely. In Massachusetts, students who won lotteries for charter schools located in urban areas often did substantially better than students who lost, while students who won lotteries for charter schools in nonurban areas fared, on average, about the same or somewhat worse compared to those who lost. A common feature of the charter schools with the most positive effects has been the adoption of a “No Excuses” educational approach.
Roland Rathelot (University of Warwick) studies the impacts of job counseling, discrimination against ethnic minorities, and residential segregation on employment. In our latest affiliate Q&A, Roland explains how his time as a civil servant in France influenced his interest in helping to solve France's chronically high unemployment rate.
In May, the State Government of Punjab, India and J-PAL South Asia signed a Memorandum of Understanding to support the government in taking an evidence-informed approach to its poverty alleviation efforts.
More than 8,000 students worldwide have enrolled in our online MicroMasters. Learn more, from WBUR: http://www.wbur.org/edify/2017/07/11/masters-mit-poverty-lab 14 hours 31 min ago.
Can preschoolers learn from math games? New randomized evaluation from MIT's Esther Duflo & co-authors published in Science magazine: j-p.al/2sxksvl 1 day 14 hours ago.
J-PAL's Esther Duflo partnered with psychologists at Harvard for an RCT on children's learning. What did they find? https://j-p.al/2sxksvl 4 days 19 hours ago.
Did you know J-PAL has six regional offices around the world?
Learn more about our teams in Cambridge, Cape Town, Jakarta, New Delhi, Paris, and Santiago! https://www.povertyactionlab.org/regions 1 week 5 days ago.
"Don't give up on democracy, improve it." Lessons from parliamentary debates in Sierra Leone, in VoxDev: http://voxdev.org/topic/institutions-political-economy/improving-democratic-accountability-sierra-leone 2 weeks 8 hours ago.
Smartcards for smarter payments
Research by J-PAL affiliates found that biometric technology and smart ID cards reduced leakage due to corruption and raised participation rates in the...
