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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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Researching racial equity: Stratification economics

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In J-PAL North America’s researching racial equity blog series, we discuss how research plays a critical role in identifying structural inequities in systems and policies that disproportionately affect communities of color. In part three, Dania Francis (UMass Boston), a researcher in the J-PAL...
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Researching racial equity: Racial discrimination, choice constraints, and policy implications

In this interview with J-PAL staff, J-PAL affiliated professor Peter Christensen (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) discusses his ongoing series of evaluations, including a 2021 paper on housing discrimination, and the role randomized evaluations can play in addressing racial inequities.
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The J-PAL dataverse turns 15: Fifteen uses for published RCT data packages

In July, we published a blog describing how to access any of the 130+ datasets (and other materials!) from the J-PAL dataverse, our primary location for publishing data and replication packages produced from the randomized controlled trials (RCTs) our affiliated researchers have run over the past...
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Long-run outcomes: Measuring program effectiveness over time

This blog covers lessons learned from the results of long-run studies thus far, advice for designing studies to measure long-run impacts, and opportunities for researchers to utilize new data sources and technology to build-in long-run tracking and follow-up.
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Announcing J-PAL’s Science for Progress Initiative

SfPI is part of a broader effort to equip the scientific ecosystem with the capabilities needed to apply the scientific method to itself—to create, in other words, a practice of “metascience.” Under SfPI, J-PAL will apply the methodological approach of randomized evaluation to the practice of...
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Resources for measuring precise and accurate outcomes in randomized evaluations

The repository is a collection of resources that introduce the measurement issues, tools, and innovations in a specific topic or question type. It is a companion piece to our Introduction to measurement and indicators and Survey design pages, compiling resources that discuss and provide guidance on...
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Evidence for digital and bundled services: Framing a research agenda for the Digital Agricultural Innovations and Services Initiative

As the reach of digital agricultural services has grown rapidly within the last few years, building an evidence base on how these services should be designed, implemented, and scaled to best align with the priorities of small-scale producers is an important and timely issue—and one that J-PAL's...
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Newly published data on health care hotspotting study underscores the importance of research transparency

The team behind the evaluation on health care hotspotting describes why they prioritized publishing replication data and lessons learned from the process.