In Ghana, researchers worked with a bank that provides services to low-income customers with limited access to mainstream banking to evaluate the impact of sending pre-recorded informational voice calls and text messages on the adoption of mobile banking. Clients that received messages encouraging mobile banking were more likely to use mobile banking services and repay loans on time, while clients that received messages encouraging savings only had no measurable change in behavior.

Researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation to test the impact of a package of interventions with the aim of improving the quality of nurseries, enhancing nutrition, and empowering women to address poverty and promote early childhood development in Egypt.

Increasing levels of migration to the European Union have created significant challenges for governments to ensure migrants fully integrate and thrive in their host societies, but there is little rigorous evidence that evaluates current programs that promote social inclusion. Researchers are conducting a randomized evaluation to test the impact of a peer matching program that aims to increase information and improve social capital on migrants’ social attitudes, Swedish language skills, employment, education levels, and general feeling of belonging in Sweden.

Building off of previous quasi-experimental research, researchers conducted three randomized evaluations to test the impact of providing farmers with land tax subsidies, different ways of monitoring water access and the canal’s operations and maintenance, or farming minikits on farmers' use of irrigation on their cultivated land. Researchers found that none of the interventions affected farmers’ choices to adopt irrigation, suggesting that there were more binding factors that constrained farmers’ decision-making.

Researchers tested whether sharing messages that appealed to negative emotions, like shame or disgust, increased households’ hand washing behavior and willingness to pay for water chlorination in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Negative messaging had no impact on chlorination levels or willingness to pay, but the provision of low-cost hand washing facilities did increase hand washing.

Researchers evaluated the effect of Argentina’s lottery-based conscription on draftees’ criminal activity. They found that conscription increased crime rates among draft-eligible Argentinians, especially those serving longer or during times of war.

Researchers evaluated the effect of randomly offering varied wages to bean-sorting workers in rural Malawi. While offering higher wages caused workers to increase their productivity, it did not attract more productive workers.

Youth living in poor urban areas face a number of psychological and social barriers to finding work. In France, over 40 percent of these youth are unemployed, twice as much the national youth unemployment rate. Researchers partnered with the French Public Employment Services to test the effectiveness of a collective job-search program targeting disadvantaged youth. Collective counseling was more effective in helping youth find a stable, full-time job than individual job counseling. The program performed better for jobseekers with higher employment prospects prior to the program, and in groups where participants had similar employment prospects.

Researchers evaluated and compared the impact of two different job search assistance policies on employment outcomes for young job seekers in Addis Ababa. Helping youth signal their skills to employers improved their earnings and job duration four years later, especially for youth who would usually fare the worst in the labor market. Reducing the cost of job search through a transportation subsidy improved the likelihood of having a formal job in the short run, but had no impact after four years.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to measure the impact of an information program on parental school choice and long-term student achievement. They found that the intervention shifted household school choices of those who were not enrolled before the intervention toward establishments with higher average test scores, higher value add, higher prices, and schools that tend to be further from their homes.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation to improve the quality of job matches in South Africa. They matched applicants to entry-level vacancies using different types of information: workers’ preferences for job types; communication and socio-emotional skills; or grades and work experience.

Researchers evaluated an accountability workshop program, which educated citizens on the distribution of extractive industry tax revenues and the formal means of local political participation. The program had mixed results on local government quality, increasing the likelihood of initiating recall against poor-performing mayors but also increasing civil unrest. The workshops also reduced involvement in participatory budgeting, as well as reducing mayors’ discretionary spending efforts.

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.

Researchers are partnering with the Mexico City Labor Court to evaluate whether rotating court notifiers across areas and casefiles can reduce incidences of bribery, increase the notification rates, and improve the functioning of labor courts.

Researchers conducted a randomized evaluation of the VIP:Voice, a digital election participation platform, to measure the impact of information and communications technologies on individuals’ political participation. Via the platform, researchers interacted with nearly 100,000 citizens, recruited citizen monitors in 38 percent of the wards of South Africa and deployed 347 citizen monitors to polling places. However, around 50 percent of participants dropped out at each subsequent, and more time-intensive, form of engagement requested via the platform.