J-PAL North America, based at MIT, leads J-PAL’s work in the North America region. J-PAL North America conducts randomized evaluations, builds partnerships for evidence-informed policymaking, and helps partners scale up effective programs.

Our work spans a wide range of sectors including health care, housing, criminal justice, education, and economic mobility. We leverage research by affiliated professors from universities across the continent and a full-time staff of researchers, policy experts, and administrative professionals to generate and disseminate rigorous evidence about which anti-poverty social policies work and why.

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News

Laying the foundation to diversify the economics field and center racial equity in economics research

J-PAL North America is developing a strategic vision — informed by a new racial equity advisory committee — to advance inclusion, prioritize racial equity in research, and promote equitable and inclusive research practices in its network.

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Blog

Researching racial equity: Stratification economics

 In this blog post—part of a larger series on research and racial equity—Dania Francis (UMass Boston), a researcher in the J-PAL network, provides an overview of stratification economics and how the tenets of this framework can be applied to impact evaluations.

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Blog

Tutoring Evaluation Accelerator: Building partnerships to accelerate learning

J-PAL North America announces a new partnership with Accelerate to launch the Tutoring Evaluation Accelerator, which aims to support ten tutoring providers from Accelerate’s Call to Effective Action to implement data-driven programs and generate critical evidence on tutoring.

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Blog

Building research partnerships to understand the promises of Summer Youth Employment Programs, part two

In the second of a two-part blog series, Judd Kessler (University of Pennsylvania), Sara Heller (University of Michigan), and Julia Breitman (New York City Department of Youth and Community Development) discuss their research partnership to evaluate summer youth employment programs and integrating...