J-PAL North America, based at MIT, leads J-PAL’s work in the North America region. J-PAL North America conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs.
Our work spans a wide range of sectors including health care, housing, criminal justice, education, and economic mobility. We leverage research by affiliated professors from universities across the continent and a full-time staff of researchers, policy experts, and administrative professionals to generate and disseminate rigorous evidence about which anti-poverty social policies work and why.
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Blog
Blog
Building research partnerships to understand the promises of Summer Youth Employment Programs
In the first of a two-part blog series, Judd Kessler (University of Pennsylvania), Sara Heller (University of Michigan), and Julia Breitman (New York City Department of Youth and Community Development) discuss their research partnership to evaluate summer youth employment programs and the...
Blog
Blog
Overcoming administrative burdens: Strategies to increase access to health insurance in the United States
A new J-PAL policy insight highlights evidence from randomized evaluations on the impact of informational “nudges”—strategies designed to inform individuals about various aspects of health insurance and influence behavior without changing legal or economic systems—on health insurance take-up. In...
Blog
Blog
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.
News
In the news
Identifying Scalable Strategies To Maintain Coverage As Medicaid Continuous Enrollment Ends
J-PAL affiliated researcher Rebecca Myerson (UW-Madison) and co-author Laura Dague (Texas A&M University) discuss the importance of applying evidence-based practices to promote health insurance take-up—and evaluating new approaches—to help keep individuals insured at a critical time.