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Browse news articles about J-PAL and our affiliated professors, and read our press releases and monthly global and research newsletters. For media inquiries, please email us.

The Role of Reference Letters and Skill Accreditation in the South African Labour Market

Employers in the low-skill and entry-level job market often lack information on job seekers’ abilities, which can reduce interview invitations and job offers for job seekers, especially for disadvantaged groups such as women. Researchers partnered with the South African Department of Labour to...

Letters of Recommendation for Youth Employment in the United States

Researchers partnered with SYEP employers to create personalized letters of recommendation for SYEP participants to evaluate the impact of recommendation letters on participants’ educational and employment outcomes after the program. Youth who received the letter of recommendation saw a 3 percentage...

Institutional Reform and De Facto Women's Rights in Punjab, Pakistan

Kate Vyborny
Researchers are partnering with the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women to evaluate the impacts of a training program for registrars on their knowledge of and adherence to the law.

Do Students Benefit from Blended Instruction?

In partnership with Avanti Fellows, this study evaluates the impact of the Sankalp program, which provides teachers with resources and training to blend their instruction with video-based learning materials, on student’s math and science test scores.

The Impact of Stigma on Labor Market Assistance Take-Up in Egypt

Jamin D. Speer
Researchers studied the impact of acknowledging and refuting stigma on take-up of labor market assistance programs. The results of three randomized evaluations indicated that mentioning stigma, even with the aim of dispelling it, generally reduced take-up of these programs.

The Impact of Candidates’ Political Connections on Voters' Expressed Support in Pakistan

Researchers evaluated the impact of randomly varied information about candidates’ political connections on voter’s beliefs and self-expressed support in the context of a 2015 local election in Sargodha, a district in rural Pakistan. Providing information on candidates’ connectedness increased voter...

The Impact of Government-run Remedial Education Programs on Student Learning in Ghana

Building on previous research, researchers in this study evaluated the impact of several targeted instruction programs on the learning outcomes of primary school students in Ghana’s public schools. Researchers found significant improvements in numeracy and literacy on average; of the four...

Characterizing Firm-Level Discrimination

Researchers studied hiring discrimination among major employers in the United States by sending fictional resumes, with varying demographic information, to determine whether certain characteristics would lead to different follow-up contact rates. Employers were less likely to contact resumes with...