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News, ideas, and analysis from J-PAL staff and affiliated professors. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly email updates.

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J-PAL LAC at 15: Expanding ECD programs through evidence in the region

As we mark fifteen years of J-PAL’s Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) office, we are recapping key milestones and sharing what we have learned in a new blog series. The series highlights lessons from working with those who make our mission a reality: our donors, implementing partners, J-PAL...
Pascaline Dupas welcoming ENSEA into ADEPT

Building a worldwide Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training

The Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) is a new effort led by J-PAL together with universities, training institutions, and other actors to empower researchers and decision-makers to use evidence to solve complex policy problems.
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.

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.
A woman stands in front of her fruit stand

Test, learn, adapt: Maximizing impact through continuous rapid evaluation

By
  • Hannah Ornas
  • Phillip Okull
  • Meghan Mahoney
In this guest blog, staff from Educate!, a youth employment organization in East Africa, share how they incorporate learnings from randomized evaluations into their program design and implementation.
Headshot of Zakayo

African Scholar Spotlight: Zakayo Zakaria

This post is part of our ongoing series showcasing the work and perspectives of economists from the African continent who are leading randomized evaluations. Through our African Scholars Program, we hope to help create more opportunities for African researchers to advance the research agenda on the...
Three Nobel laureates are pictured as sketched illustrations.

J-PAL affiliates awarded 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics

By
  • J-PAL
The 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to J-PAL affiliates Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, and co-recipient Simon Johnson, for their research on how institutions are formed and affect prosperity.
Children in a Classroom

Field notes: The power of community partnerships for scaling learning interventions

The world has made tremendous progress in getting children into schools. Not so much in making them learn. In India, which has one of the biggest school systems in the world, nearly every eligible child receives primary education. But almost half of 10-year-olds struggle to read a simple story by...
Person seated at a desk working in front of multiple monitors.

Why common balance tests are over-indicating imbalance in randomization and what to do about it

In a new working paper, J-PAL affiliated researchers Jason Kerwin and Olivier Sterck, and J-PAL alumna Nada Rostom demonstrate how standard balance tests used in randomized evaluations indicate imbalance too often.