Blog

News

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 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...

The Impact of Citizen Monitoring on the 2019 Mayoral Elections in Colombia

Mateo Montenegro
Researchers evaluated the impact of encouraging citizen monitoring on the 2019 mayoral elections in Colombia. The intervention resulted in higher reports from citizens and a reduction in observed irregularities in the election.

Quantifying Racial Discrimination in Major US Housing Markets

Researchers conducted a correspondence study assessing property managers’ responses to rental listing inquiries from prospective tenants with distinctively Black, Hispanic/Latinx, or white names in the United States. Property managers were significantly less likely to respond to messages from...

Smart Meters: Do Prices Matter to Their Adoption and Do They Save Energy?

Michael Price
Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to test the impact of financial incentives on the take-up of energy-efficient smart meters and subsequent energy use in partnership with British Gas. While offering incentives increased smart meter adoption, customers did not reduce their energy...

Valuing Trust in Shantytowns in Peru

Markus Mobius
Tanya Rosenblat
Adam Szeidl
In collaboration with PRISMA, a Peruvian NGO offering credit through village banks, researchers designed and implemented a new loan product, which required new clients to be sponsored by existing clients, to measure the relative importance of social networks and prices for borrowing in shantytowns...

The Role of Exposure, Social Networks and Marketing Messages in Households' Willingness to Pay for Malaria Prevention in Kenya

This study evaluated the impact of subsidies and two different marketing messages on the take-up of insecticide-treated bed nets by rural households. Take-up did not vary with the framing of marketing messages but was highly sensitive to changes in price. Gaining access to a highly subsidized bed...

Counseling Welfare Recipients in Hauts de Seine, France

Thierry Kamionka
Laurent Lequien
Researchers sought to test whether intensive job counseling with a private provider is an effective means of increasing employment rates, even for a population with such a low attachment to the labor market. Results suggested that job-counseling increased employment rates among counseled individuals...