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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.

Transport Subsidies and Job Matchmaking in South Africa

In sub-Saharan Africa, youth unemployment is expected to reach 50 percent by 2025. One reason for high unemployment among this group is that youth may live geographically far from where many jobs are located, making traveling to search for employment difficult and expensive. Researchers conducted a...

The Impact of Health Education on Behavior and Nutrition in China

Renfu Luo
Alexis Medina
Scott Rozelle
Yaojiang Shi
Linxiu Zhang
Huiping Zhang
Health education campaigns are often seen as a way to promote healthy behaviors and encourage the adoption of inexpensive life-saving and life-improving technologies. Researchers evaluated three health education campaigns for parents that aimed to reduce iron-deficiency anemia among primary school...

Improving Yields and Health through a High-Yielding Rice Variety (NERICA) in Sierra Leone

Improved crop varieties have the potential to produce higher yields than traditional varieties, but rural farmers often do not have the knowledge to properly grow these crops. Researchers seek to understand how providing different amounts of training on how to cultivate NERICA-3, a high-yield but...

The Effect of India's Total Sanitation Campaign on Defecation Behaviors and Child Health

Benjamin Arnhold
Bertha Briceno
Sandipan Ganguly
John M. Colford Jr.
Sumeet R Patil
Alicia L. Salvatore

Peer Group Assignment and Student Achievement in the United States

Researchers evaluated the impact of creating peer groups optimized to improve the academic achievement of lower-ability first-year students at the United States Air Force Academy. Placing lower-ability students in the optimized groups, which mixed them with a relatively large number of peers with...

Video-based Group Extension for Women Farmers in India

Tushi Baul
Kentaro Toyama
Kathryn Vasilaky
In partnership with Digital Green and Jeevika, researchers conducted a randomized evaluation in Bihar, India, to assess the impact of a video-based training on female farmers’ adoption of a climate-smart technique called System of Rice Intensification (SRI), and their yields and profits. Farmers...

Using Social Networks to Spread Word-of-Mouth Information Campaigns in Rural India

Researchers conducted two randomized evaluations in India in which they identified effective individuals for information sharing ("gossips") through word-of-mouth. They found that information was disseminated more widely when shared by individuals nominated by others in their community, rather than...