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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.

Delivering Conditional Cash Transfers Through Checking and Savings Accounts in Chile

Many beneficiaries of social welfare programs around the world receive benefits in cash or by check. Can distributing welfare benefits through electronic transfers directly into bank accounts help some of these low-income individuals enter the formal financial sector? Researchers are partnering with...

Radio Public Service Announcements and Voter Participation Among Native Americans in the United States

Eline A de Rooij
Can media campaigns increase voter turnout among those underrepresented in the electorate? Researchers randomly assigned areas covered by Native American radio programming to either receive or not receive targeted radio messaging encouraging listeners to vote in the 2008 and 2010 US elections. The...

Donating Time for Democracy: Encouraging Citizen Participation in Electoral Work in Mexico

In this study, researchers are partnering with the national electoral authority to test a range of policy interventions designed to ultimately improve poll workers’ attendance during the 2017 state elections.

The Demand for Status Goods in Indonesia

Working with a large bank in Indonesia that markets platinum credit cards to high-income customers, researchers designed a series of randomized evaluations to understand the demand for status goods. Overall, researchers found that a substantial part of the demand for the platinum card is explained...

The Role of Information and Preferences in School Choices in Romania

Robert Ainsworth
Rajeev Dehejia
In this randomized evaluation in Romania, researchers compared the roles of preferences and information in households’ decision-making, with regard to high school selection. Results suggest that households provided with information on school quality tend to choose schools that have a greater...

Testing Alternative Job Evaluation Schemes to Improve Civil Servants’ Work Performance in China

Employers often rely on subjective performance evaluations by supervisors to gauge the performance of workers–particularly in the public sector, where civil servants’ work performance is hard to measure. However, relying on the opinions of local supervisors could cause subordinates to prioritize...

Gender Differences in the Workplace: Evidence from a Tanzanian Factory

In Tanzania, researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation to test the impact of factory employment and different compensation schemes on gender differences in labor market outcomes, taste for competition, and views on social and gender norms.