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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 Impact of Credit Scores on Lending in Colombia

Ximena Cadena
Alexandra Cristea
Héber M. Delgado-Medrano
Daniel Paravisini
Researchers examined whether small incentives and short-term goals could encourage Colombian loan officers to stop procrastinating. Under the new incentive structure, loan officers spread their work more evenly throughout each month, and they met a much greater percentage of their monthly targets.

The Impact of PROGRESA on Health in Mexico

Simone Peart Boyce
Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are designed to incentivize parents to invest in their children's health and wellbeing, while providing cash transfers to improve their current welfare. Researchers evaluated the impact of Mexico’s national CCT program (“PROGRESA”) on a wide range of health...

Gender-specific managerial training program and firm productivity in Colombia

Researchers are evaluating the impact of providing a gender-specific managerial training program on career advancement prospects for women and workplace productivity.

Formal Rainfall Insurance for the Informally Insured in India

Mark Rosenzweig
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test how informal insurance within Indian sub-castes affected the demand for formal rainfall insurance, and subsequent risk-taking among households employed in agriculture. Informal insurance both increased and decreased the demand for formal rainfall...

Increasing Women’s Local Political Participation Through Top-Down and Bottom-Up Training in Indonesia

A researcher evaluated the impact of empowerment training for female citizens and training for male council chairs on women's participation in neighborhood associations, known as rukun tetangga (RT) in Malang, East Java, Indonesia.

Local Leadership and the Voluntary Provision of Public Goods in Bolivia

María P. Recalde
Researchers used a randomized evaluation to test how local leaders influence the voluntary provision of public goods. They solicited contributions for environmental education books, which all members of the community would be able to access, and varied whether leaders made public contributions. They...

The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment in the United States

Heidi Allen
Mira Bernstein
Jonathan Gruber
Joseph P. Newhouse
Eric Schneider
Jae Song
Sarah Taubman
Bill Wright
Alan Zaslavsky
In a series of evaluations, researchers took advantage of a lottery that gave low-income uninsured adults the chance to apply for Medicaid in the United States to examine the impact of health insurance on these outcomes over the first two years.