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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 the VAT for Tax Enforcement

The Value Added Tax (VAT) system, which generates a paper trail on transactions between firms, facilitated tax enforcement by spreading the impact of enforcement measures up the production chain in a study with over 400,000 firms in Chile.

Isolating the effects of personalization in a targeted instruction program in India

Are the effects of targeted instruction programs—such as Teaching at the Right Level or Computer Adaptive Learning (CAL) software—indeed driven by personalization? In partnership with an education assessment firm, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to isolate the impact of computer-based...

Financial Education vs. Access to Finance Among Filipino Migrants

Paolo Abarcar

International remittances are an important financial tool for many developing countries, and many organizations offer financial products or financial education services to help families manage the remittances they receive. Researchers provided families with financial products and financial education...

Performance Incentives and Grants for Health in China

Renfu Luo
Scott Rozelle
Sean Sylvia
Marcos Vera-Hernandez
In many developing countries, absenteeism, lack of accountability, and corruption among public employees prevent the effective distribution of public services. Researchers examined how performance incentives and increased resources for school principals affected the implementation of a school-based...

Seed Fairs for the Diffusion of New Crop Varieties in India

Manzoor H. Dar
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test whether organizing short learning sessions for villagers about early adopters’ use of a flood-tolerant rice seed variety, Swarna-Sub1, impacted other farmers’ adoption of it. These “farmer field days” were a cost-effective strategy to improve...

The Impact of an Agricultural Training Program on Technology Use in Bangladesh

Maria Jones
Florence Kondylis
Daniel Stein
Despite recent economic growth in Bangladesh, food insecurity remains widespread. Researchers evaluated the impact of an agricultural training program for farmer groups on technology adoption in rural Bangladesh, and investigated what drives adoption and who is affected by the training, both...