Flood-tolerant rice reduced risk for smallholder farmers in Odisha, India and encouraged additional investment in their farms, resulting in substantially increased yields in both flood and non-flood years.

An intensive counseling program for job seekers at risk of long-term unemployment in France helped them find work sooner than the standard low-intensity counseling program, and the counseling was more effective when provided by a public agency than by private contractors.

In rural Malawi, providing information about voluntary medical male circumcision and HIV transmission risk reduced risky sexual behavior among uncircumcised men, but did not increase take-up of circumcision. A subsequent evaluation of a voucher program in urban Malawi found that providing...

Performance pay for tax officials in Punjab, Pakistan significantly increased tax revenues without harming taxpayer satisfaction.

Weather index insurance protects farmers against losses from extreme weather and facilitates investment in their farms, but randomized evaluations in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa have shown low demand for these products at market prices, suggesting the need for alternative approaches.

The Value Added Tax (VAT) system, which generates a paper trail on transactions between firms, facilitated tax enforcement by spreading the impact of enforcement measures up the production chain in a study with over 400,000 firms in Chile.

The estimated impacts of charter schools have varied widely. In Massachusetts, students who won lotteries for charter schools located in urban areas often did substantially better than students who lost, while students who won lotteries for charter schools in nonurban areas fared, on average, about...

Student participation is sensitive to the perceived costs and benefits of education. Although the costs are immediate and easy to observe, school quality and the long-run benefits of education are more difficult to perceive. Children, not only their parents, are important to consider when designing...

In India, a biometrically authenticated payment system reduced corruption and substantially improved the delivery of government social assistance programs despite partial implementation.

While past approaches to helping students transition to college have focused on increasing financial aid, the college application process itself presents a barrier to college access. J-PAL's new policy bulletin summarizes five randomized evaluations of interventions designed to improve college...

Summer youth employment programs that provided minimum wage summer jobs to mainly disadvantaged youth in New York City and Chicago reduced arrests for violent crimes, incarceration, and premature deaths.

Across a range of programs, interventions that successfully changed the calculus of costs and benefits of unprotected sexual activity and childbirth delayed pregnancy among adolescents. Some programs directly altered costs and benefits while others shifted perceptions of them.

Disadvantaged students who attended France’s first “boarding school of excellence” had large improvements in math scores after two years. Students initially experienced reductions in well-being, but adjusted to their new environment by the second year.

Parent meetings with school principals that provided guidance on selecting academic tracks helped reduce grade repetition and high school dropout among low-achieving students in France.

Offering tutoring and career counseling to high-performing immigrant students closed the educational gap between native-born and immigrant boys in Italy.