The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. Anchored by a network of more than 1,000 researchers at universities around the world, J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty.
Our affiliated professors are based at over 120 universities and conduct randomized evaluations around the world to design, evaluate, and improve programs and policies aimed at reducing poverty. They set their own research agendas, raise funds to support their evaluations, and work with J-PAL staff on research, policy outreach, and training.
Our Board of Directors, which is composed of J-PAL affiliated professors and senior management, provides overall strategic guidance to J-PAL, our sector programs, and regional offices.
J-PAL recognizes that there is a lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the field of economics and in our field of work. Read about what actions we are taking to address this.
We host events around the world and online to share results and policy lessons from randomized evaluations, to build new partnerships between researchers and practitioners, and to train organizations on how to design and conduct randomized evaluations, and use evidence from impact evaluations.
Browse news articles about J-PAL and our affiliated professors, read our press releases and monthly global and research newsletters, and connect with us for media inquiries.
Based at leading universities around the world, our experts are economists who use randomized evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty. Connect with us for all media inquiries and we'll help you find the right person to shed insight on your story.
J-PAL is based at MIT in Cambridge, MA and has seven regional offices at leading universities in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
J-PAL is based at MIT in Cambridge, MA and has seven regional offices at leading universities in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Middle East and North Africa, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
Our global office is based at the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It serves as the head office for our network of seven independent regional offices.
Led by affiliated professors, J-PAL sectors guide our research and policy work by conducting literature reviews; by managing research initiatives that promote the rigorous evaluation of innovative interventions by affiliates; and by summarizing findings and lessons from randomized evaluations and producing cost-effectiveness analyses to help inform relevant policy debates.
Led by affiliated professors, J-PAL sectors guide our research and policy work by conducting literature reviews; by managing research initiatives that promote the rigorous evaluation of innovative interventions by affiliates; and by summarizing findings and lessons from randomized evaluations and producing cost-effectiveness analyses to help inform relevant policy debates.
How do policies affecting private sector firms impact productivity gaps between higher-income and lower-income countries? How do firms’ own policies impact economic growth and worker welfare?
How can we identify effective policies and programs in low- and middle-income countries that provide financial assistance to low-income families, insuring against shocks and breaking poverty traps?
This study examines how providing information on the health consequences of artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) influences political accountability in Ghana. By screening a documentary in ASGM-affected communities, the researchers aim to update...
Social networks are a key component of political processes and political participation. However, recent evidence from Brazil, the context of the researchers' study, demonstrates that social networks have become increasingly politically segregated. In this...
A fiscal social contract in which citizens pay taxes and the government is accountable to taxpayer demands in the way funds are spent is a fundamental characteristic of many democratic states. However, many LMICs exhibit low tax compliance and dissatisfaction...
How can humanitarian aid be most cost-effectively delivered? How does receiving humanitarian aid shape recipients’ beliefs about the government’s effectiveness and legitimacy, and by extension, their political participation? The research team proposes to study...
How does access to independent digital media affect citizens' knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in an autocracy? A growing body of work has sought to explore how independent digital media shapes public opinion in autocracies, yet to date no experimental...
Multidisciplinary Type I Proposal (exploratory research) The charismatic movement has reshaped Christianity over the last century, challenging the traditional dominance of hierarchical organizations like the Catholic Church and Traditional Protestant Missions...
Multidisciplinary Type I Proposal (exploratory research) Among the many determinants of political participation, demographic characteristics are often considered a key driver (Olken and Pande, 2019). In ethnically diverse settings, ethnicity is often deeply...
Multidisciplinary Type II Proposal (additional research components added on to an ongoing or recently completed RCT) In Kayin, Myanmar, our team of social scientists and medical doctors is conducting a randomized control trial with Community Partners...
Multidisciplinary Type I Proposal (exploratory research) The judiciary is an important branch of the state that plays a key role in enforcing rule of law, protecting citizens’ rights, and enforcing contracts to enable efficient functioning of markets. Recent...
Multidisciplinary Type I Proposal (exploratory research) The aim of the current study is to lay the groundwork for a scalable radio drama focused on promoting local political participation, especially by women. The setting for the proposed study is Tanzania...
This project will focus on the current jihadist insurgency in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. It will study how intergroup contact between internally displaced people (IDPs) and local hosts can promote the social integration of both groups – measured with a...
Misinformation is not just an information problem but an outcome of limited daily interactions between different societal groups, often contributing to the lessened political support of ingroups for outgroup integration. Conventional academic approaches that...
Income inequalities have risen starkly across the globe in recent decades. Yet societies worldwide are increasingly organized along ethno-religious lines rather than economic ones. This puzzle is particularly true of Lebanon, where ethno-religious voting blocs...
This project explores whether policies promoting gender equality remain underrepresented in conservative countries because political elites misperceive voter demand for such policies. To estimate voter demand, we use experimental variation to evaluate voter...
Adverse health outcomes in the Global South can often be prevented by greater uptake and better delivery of health services. This partly reflects the limited information possessed by local authorities about citizen priorities and experiences in health clinics...
Digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any other innovation in history. The gains from technology are however very heterogeneous across sectors and firms. This proposal aims to study: (i) the ways governments can leverage new e-monitoring...
When citizens lack exposure to media sources that offer contrasting perspectives, biased information consumption diets risk entrenching political views and exacerbating polarization. This might especially be the case in dominant party settings where citizens...
India’s success in broadening political representation – through decentralization and political reservations for disadvantaged groups – has brought in new leaders. However, many of these leaders may be unfamiliar with how government works and lack the networks...
Firms in LMICs often argue that complying with taxation would put them at a competitive disadvantage with respect to non-compliant competitors. We aim to experimentally vary the compliance of taxpayers’ geographic neighbors and competitors in the case of...
This pilot considers the governance challenge of getting high human capital, high integrity, representative citizens to put themselves forward for consideration as political candidates. We plan to explore potential solutions to this challenge with our partners...
Economic growth in developing countries is often limited by the state's inability to raise tax revenue, and property tax collection is particularly important given its revenue is typically used to finance critical public goods and services. However, in many...
Support for democracy is dangerously low and decreasing in Latin America and many countries. At the same time polarization is high and on the rise. In this project we test whether a civic education program---developed by Democracy International and delivered...
In developing contexts where the state’s reach and credibility are limited, social media could help connect citizens with government and shape pro-social behaviors by informing and encouraging citizen action. These phenomena are especially important during the...
“Participatory” development emphasizes a “bottom-up” approach focusing on community control over planning and implementation decisions to improve development outcomes. We propose to assess the value of community participation in the location choice and...
We evaluate a large-scale training program aiming to build capacity within Indonesia’s village governments. In 2014, the Government of Indonesia passed the Village Law, significantly increasing fiscal resources for the country’s 74,954 villages. However...
Women’s interests remain underrepresented in local policymaking despite the implementation of community-based and participatory planning and budgeting programs in much of the developing world. Male dominance in neighborhood institutions may make it difficult...
Clientelism and other forms of electoral corruption remain an important challenge to democratic institutions in the developing world. Bottom-up monitoring technologies, which rely on civil society to oversee the provision of public goods and services, have...
Bribery inhibits private-enterprise development in emerging-market economies. Solving this problem requires a thorough understanding of how corruption works, but economists' current knowledge is in complete. In particular, a first-order question remains...
While theoretical and historical work has explored the relationship between public goods, taxation, and the formation of democratic institutions, there is a considerable gap in empirical evidence. Haiti is piloting a system for managing federal transfers and...
Labor courts are essential for addressing grievances adequately and for well-functioning labor markets. Unfortunately, courts in developing countries function poorly. In Mexico, the law indicates that all lawsuits should be adjudicated within 3 months, but...
Does media attention improve local governance? In collaboration with two Tanzanian District Commissioners and two local radio stations, I propose to pilot a novel field experiment to assess the impact of investigative media reports on village water service...
Ghana, like most other developing countries, is characterized by low state-capacity for tax collection. The lack of tax revenues for public good provision is felt especially keenly at the local government level, where revenue collections and hence public good...
Tax compliance is a key challenge for low-capacity states seeking to expand their tax base. A first-order question that remains largely unanswered in the developing world context is: what are the direct and indirect /network effects of government’s enforcement...
The quality, incentives, and ideologies of local civil servants greatly affect policy implementation and governance efficacy. This project aims to understand what shape the background, preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of civil servants in rural China. We...
We examine how citizens can hold policy actors accountable for public service delivery. We do so through a randomized control trial that introduces community-based mobilization interventions to improve public schooling in Pakistan. Based on our pilot, we vary...
Our project will combine new theory and an RCT in Paraguay to provide new in-sights into tax evasion by firms and how policymakers can respond to reduce evasion. We extend the canonical model of tax evasion in two ways. First, we model firms re-porting...
This is a collaborative project with the City government of Santo Domingo to design and evaluate different interventions to improve payment compliance for public garbage collection. In a first stage, we will analyze data on payment histories, as well as...
Pay-for-performance (P4P) has shown to be effective in improving job performance in both private and public organizations. Existing literature has studied the effect of P4P within a single tier of the organizational hierarchy, mostly focusing on frontline...
Do politicians possess accurate information about citizen preferences and can better information bring politicians' actions closer to citizen preferences? In a sample of 360 local elected representatives in Pakistan, I test how accurate politicians are about...
This project has been canceled. We study the gender gap in politics in Pakistan. We construct social networks of women in 30 villages and design an experiment that creates a mechanism to encourage women who are most likely not to participate in politics –...
This project capitalizes on an opportunity to redesign a centralized labor market match to address two questions related to improving personnel management in bureaucracies and improving national unity. The program, G-United, places Kenyan university graduates...
The Delhi Government’s Public Grievance Monitoring System (PGMS) seeks to redress citizen complaints about public goods and services. Currently, the redressal process is slow, resolutions are of poor quality, and citizen satisfaction is low. We seek to pilot...
Corruption and delays in government service delivery are positively correlated at the cross-country level, but it is not known if the relationship is causal in either direction. We propose a model of how the ability of bureaucrats to cause delays increases the...
We propose studying the role of conformity and peer effects in corrupt behavior among bureaucrats of a large public service provider in Kenya. Peer pressure has been shown to have the potential to increase productivity and may have the potential to discipline...
Widespread accountability gaps in the public health sectors of low- and middle- income countries account for many government failures to deliver available, affordable health interventions. In Uganda, local political leaders have the potential to mitigate...
This research project focuses on a trade barrier for small-scale cross-border traders. These traders (mostly women) face harassment and pay bribes to cross the border, increasing their-already substantial-trade costs. An asymmetry of information between...
Bad governance can be due not only to corruption but to deliberate, inefficient policy choices that pander to interest groups. The free provision of power to farmers in Punjab, India, is an example of such a policy. Farmers, given power for free, use too much...
This project examines a Kenyan government program, G-United, which places university graduates in primary schools around the country with the goals of boosting national unity and improving student learning. One part of the project examines the effect of the...
This project works with the government of the city of Manaus, Brazil to improve compliance with the municipal property tax. Specifically, we aim to understand the role that horizontal inequity -- similar households being treated differently by tax policy --...
The proposed study will test the effect a steeper wage progression between low-tier employees (e.g., frontline service providers) and higher-tier employees (e.g. supervisors, bosses) has on organizational performance. Further, we will test whether if this...
Why don't communities adopt democratic or inclusive institutions after a community- driven development program, despite professing higher pro-social values in surveys? Using a novel field experiment which elicits ex-ante valuation of dierent decision-making...
In the context of Liberia, one of the world’s poorest democracies where democratic accountability is weakest, USAID and Internews Liberia ambitiously ran standardized debates between legislative candidates in all 73 electoral districts, designed to solicit...
Many civic institutions like democracy require a substantial degree of citizen engagement and prosocial behavior. In Mexican elections, citizens staff polling booths and count votes, providing a privately-costly public good. However, it is becoming harder to...
This project explores the relationship between regional party strongholds, where competition in the general election is weak and generates little accountability pressure, and the poor performance of elected officials. In such areas, the competition of import...
Unconditional cash transfers to poor households are one of the most important innovations in poverty reduction in the last quarter-century. We build on two studies which randomly allocate the rollout of an unconditional cash transfer program, run by...
Compliance is a key challenge for low-capacity states seeking to expand their tax base. A first order question that remains largely unanswered in the developing world context is: What is the elasticity of tax compliance with respect to the marginal tax rate...
Low quality care and leakages are known to plague the Indian public health system. Although the public sector is largely free (representing a large subsidy), poor households either forego care or pay high costs to go to the private sector, exposing themselves...
Contact between members of different social groups might have the potential to reduce prejudice and promote intergroup harmony. However, little rigorous evidence exists on the conditions under which this might be the case. Researchers conducted a randomized...
We consider a case of career incentives given to local civil servants hired by the Chinese Government to serve the broad needs of the population. In collaboration with the regional officials and a provincial research center focusing on local governance, we...
A significant challenge to the provision of local public services–water, sanitation, waste removal, etc.–in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries, the social compact, whereby...
One of the biggest challenges in supplying education services to poor populations is low personnel morale, low engagement, and high absenteeism. This problem is particularly severe in Uganda, where teacher absenteeism rates are estimated at 27%. However...
Women’s rights to make life choices such as whether and when to marry and divorce are intrinsically important. Yet in many contexts, the law on the books is substantially more progressive than the de facto practice of the law. Pakistan is a good example: the...
Weak states with poor institutions often lack the capacity to implement and/or to enforce labor regulations aimed at improving working conditions. Increasingly, private actors are enforcing labor standards in these countries, but the effects of their...
What is the role of community preferences in driving the viability of village relocation programs following natural disasters? Nepal’s post-2015 earthquake village resettlement program, an effort to shift high-risk communities to safer, previously unsettled...
Labor courts are essential for well-functioning labor markets and the provision of justice. In Mexico, labor courts are characterized by long delays in trials, low settlement rates, misinformation and overconfidence among plaintiffs, and lawsuit inflation. We...
Tax compliance is a key priority for developing countries. The project investigates the role of timing of taxation. Can relaxing the timing of tax obligations increase compliance, by allowing firms to better align their tax payments with cash flow? Standard...
The great majority of individuals in lower income countries are self-employed, which considerably limits the ability of governments to tax income. “Tax collectors” who walk from stalls to stalls on a daily basis to collect taxes in cash from vendors are...
Bogota’s Mayor and police have ambitious plans to extend state order to the corners of the city where they do not hold a monopoly of violence. They aim not only to reduce crime and violence, but also to increase state legitimacy and civilian support. The...
This project has been canceled. Our project seeks to evaluate the impact of a program by the Government of Bangladesh to deliver certain land-related services electronically. The technological intervention proposes to reduce bureaucratic discretion and enable...
Our project aims to establish whether targeted provision of constituent preferences increases the responsiveness of legislators. Using a randomized evaluation, we assign delegates in the Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) to one of three groups: (1) those...
Governments must pay their employees for states to function. Frequent delays and leakage of salary payments can undermine government effectiveness. These problems are severe in Afghanistan. Mobile Salary Payments (MSPs)—a system enabling employees to receive...
The implementation of social protection programs remains a challenge in developing countries, often to the particular detriment of the most vulnerable intended beneficiaries. We will investigate the potential of a new internet- and mobile-based management and...
This study examines the determinants of petty corruption in the DRC. In pilot data, 42 percent of motorcycle taxi drivers reported paying less than the official rate at tolls. To explain this high rate of non-compliance, we randomly offer motorcycle taxi...
In many Indian states, a quarter or a half of the power pumped into the grid disappears, and the other part is sold at prices far below cost. These implicit and explicit electricity subsidies are meant as a lifeline to farmers, allowing the spread of...
Since the 1990s, Community Driven Development (CDD) has become an increasingly common approach for development assistance. This has led the academic literature to assess the extent to which CDD programs can affect social norms and behaviors in benefiting...
Decades of unaccountable leadership, conflict and underdevelopment have limited the reach of the state into rural Sierra Leone and left communities with a dearth of public services. This project explores two distinct mechanisms to bridge the gap between...
This project has been canceled. We propose to study if politicians improve performance in office through investment in political capital. We randomly vary three channels of investment; training, peer learning and mentorship. We also propose to study if peer...
The Government of Indonesia (GoI) is embarking on a radical shift in Raskin, Indonesia’s largest targeted social assistance program, moving from in-kind transfers run by the government to a novel delivery system: restricted electronic vouchers that can be...
This project explores the extent to which age sets, a traditional social structure in many African societies, can be exploited to improve local oversight, governance, and the provision of public goods. Age sets are initiation rituals that create cohesive...
Extractive industries represent a major part of the local economy in many rural parts of Peru, but political capture, corruption and poor management mean that many rural communities do not experience development improvements. Seeing only the negative...
This project has been canceled. Procurement is one of the largest categories of government expenditure, accounting for about 12% of GDP on average in OECD countries. While much attention has been paid to how contracts are awarded, a key understudied issue in...
The Chinese government introduced in 2006 the CGVO (Selecting College Graduates to Work as Village Officials) program that will have placed, by the end of 2015, college graduates in 400,000 rural villages as assistants to the elected village chairperson or to...
This project has been canceled. Radio provides governmental and non-governmental organizations with the means to cheaply communicate with large populations. Moreover, in some countries – and South Sudan in particular – listening to the radio remains a primary...
What motivates people to seek political office? We design and evaluate an experiment to study how non-elite prospective politicians can be motivated to seek political office by priming them on career or pro-social motivation from entering politics, reducing...
This project features an evaluation of a local NGO's large-scale SMS-based information sharing effort in the week prior to the November 2015 state legislative assembly elections in the state of Bihar. The study contained multiple treatment arms, including: (i)...
Ensuring the well-being of particularly vulnerable groups in society remains an important priority and challenge for all governments, especially in developing countries. Oftentimes, even when welfare schemes are available, they are not taken up by those who...
Power supply, in many developing countries, is stuck in a cycle of non-payment and unreliable service. Customers do not pay because supply is poor, and the state-run utilities do not upgrade supply because, even if some customers did pay in full, the utility...
This project has been canceled. The Delhi Government plans to introduce a devolutionary scheme to create extremely localized decision making bodies called Mohalla Sabhas (MS). MS will have considerable allocative as well as oversight powers over local spending...
The importance of an informed electorate for electoral accountability is widely recognized. However, while a large literature has focused on voter access to media news sources, little is known empirically about the incentives for media stations to provide...
This project has been canceled. Tax evasion is not just a problem in the developing world; however, lower GDP has a stronger association with the propensity of working in a shadow economy. The Federal Bureau of Revenue is responsible for the formulation and...
Vote-buying remains a major impediment to democracy in low-income countries. We propose to evaluate a campaign against vote-buying targeting both the supply and the demand side of the market for votes, ahead of the 2016 election in Uganda. Our experiment will...
How should policing powers be structured to maximize the state's capacity to deliver legal protections to its citizens? When the state's reach is limited, those few interactions citizens have with police are often marked by corruption, absenteeism and abuse...
When private providers of publicly subsidized services have superior information about production and demand conditions, effective service delivery requires redistributing rents to providers. Yet, allocating excessive resources to providers reduces the surplus...
Given the persistent gender gap in political participation in India despite several decades of targeted policy interventions, I propose to evaluate a new mechanism aimed at increasing women’s political participation. The proposed RCT – which draws upon...
The importance of an informed electorate for electoral accountability is widely recognized. However, while a large literature has focused on voter access to media news sources, little is known empirically about the incentives for media stations to provide...
Vote-buying is a significant challenge to the functioning of many democracies, yet the impact of vote payments on voters’ decision-making process and behavior remains poorly understood. The objective of this project is to pilot in ten communities in rural...
A key question in governmental organizations, where pay‐for‐performance is often impractical, is whether the adoption of new monitoring technologies can induce higher employee effort and more successful public service delivery. In addition, all organizations...
Electronic payment technologies are currently being heralded as a panacea to corruption in public programs since, in theory, when cash benefits are transferred directly to beneficiaries, opportunities for leakage can be dramatically reduced. But while new...
This study evaluates a policy intervention that screens-in and selectively incentivizes good politicians. Using a randomized controlled trial (RCT), I show that a leadership training workshop in which aspiring candidates are given incentives conditional on...
While advances in monitoring and voting technologies have been shown to improve the functioning of elections, the potential importance of the remaining interactions between government officials and voters on election day is not as well understood. Leveraging...
This project investigates a number of avenues for improving the efficacy of public procurement in Chile. Interventions are grouped into three categories addressing different sources of inefficiency in public procurement: 1) the impacts of different auction...
Widespread electoral participation is a foundational element of a healthy democracy and an important mechanism for voters to exercise policy making and public spending oversight. Existing work attributes low voter turnout in developing countries to poor voter...
This project works directly with the government of Punjab, Pakistan to improve the effectiveness of public procurement. We develop two novel methods to measure procurement effectiveness and leakages based on detailed, item-level characteristics data and random...
Vote-buying is a widespread practice in developing countries that may undermine the accountability and responsiveness of elected officials, especially to the needs of the poor. One way to reduce the incidence of vote-buying is by diminishing its effectiveness...
Our project will assess Vietnam’s current process for participation by firms in the drafting of new business regulations, testing whether this participation can improve labor rights and safety. We will use an RCT to analyze downstream compliance with a...
We study a unique randomized policy innovation in Montevideo, Uruguay, in which the municipal government raffles tax holidays to eligible taxpayers. Using access to over-time tax payment records and our own survey data, we will assess the impact of holidays on...
This proposal seeks funding to support a two-year pilot study of local governance in Bénin. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of monitoring by bureaucratic actors in reducing political corruption. The proposed intervention, what we call...
This project explores the role of voter’s information in a new institutional context. The setting of the 2013 Kenyan elections differed from the widely contested 2007 elections on several dimensions, including a new electoral commission and a new set of six...
Can post-conflict reconciliation generate social cohesion and economic development within societies emerging out of civil war? Researchers conduct a randomized controlled trial of a community-based reconciliation intervention in Sierra Leone, which facilitates...
Water companies in developing countries typically measure a household’s water consumption with in-person inspections by meter readers who collect hand-written records. This system is susceptible to bribery. Customers and meter readers can collude to...
This project has been canceled. Productivity growth in agriculture--where most of the world's poor work--is very slow, in large measure due to slow technology adoption. Low awareness of best practices is commonly understood to be a problem, and many countries...
This project has been canceled. Researchers will investigate the effect of changing legal penalties, and citizens' beliefs about these penalties, on corruption. They will focus on a single, clear case: the law against riding a motorcycle without a helmet in...
Ethnic polarization is often linked to underdevelopment and poor governance. What amplifies and what mitigates ethnic tensions amongst individuals in a society? The proposed piloting and project expansion aims to understand how subtle and moderate changes in...
In collaboration with the government of Zambia, researchers are designing and evaluating alternative strategies to recruit, motivate, and retain a new cadre of civil servants: community health assistants (CHAs). CHAs will be recruited from their home...
The ability of the state to maintain trust with its citizens is a challenge in emerging economies. The proposed study examines how perceptions of relative state effectiveness determine a citizen's engagement with state and non-state actors. It does so by...
In this project, conducted jointly with IPA’s Safe Water Program (SWP), researchers seek to shed light on two issues: the impact of public versus secret voting for local positions in a context of ethnic diversity, and the impact of involving government...
This randomized evaluation explores innovative strategies that leverage information to enhance political accountability in the presence of strong ethnic and regional ties to parties in Sierra Leone. The accountability function of voting is compromised when...
Rajasthan has seen a dramatic increase in the number of road accidents attributable to drunken driving, making the combat against road accidents a top priority for the authorities. This project will test the effectiveness of different strategies in carrying...
This project will assess the effectiveness of disseminated information in improving the enforcement of environmental regulation in India. The evaluation, conducted jointly with the environmental regulator in an Indian state, will test two interventions. First...
Extensive evidence suggests that high rates of staff absence and resource leakage, enabled by poor systems of accountability, are one of the key reasons behind the low take-up and poor provision of public health services for women and children in India. To...
Although programs for setting up coffee mills and cooperatives across Africa have been successful in increasing coffee quality and the price paid to cooperatives, they have been less effective at passing these gains on to farmers. The problem appears to be...
This project has been canceled. In the aggregate, even small routine bribes can be very harmful. Petty bribes reduce the expected cost of punishment faced by individuals, diluting the deterrence effect of laws, while also providing a gateway to more serious...
We partner with provincial legislators in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan to test whether integrated voice response (IVR) technology can springboard communication between politicians and voters and thereby improve accountability, responsiveness, and development...
This project has been canceled. Despite being one of the world's fastest‐growing economies, India remains home to the largest number of malnourished people in the world, and its flagship food security scheme is plagued by leakages and inefficiencies. Yet...
Improving tax revenue collection is an important priority for developing economies throughout the world. Traditional methods for improving compliance have generally relied on a punishment-based method: audits, coupled with penalties, for non-compliant...
This project has been canceled. Countries throughout the developing world have decentralized the delivery of public services to local governments, in hopes that the informational advantages of local officials may improve the allocation and targeting of public...