The County of San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance, and Analytics (OEPA), Planning and Development Services (PDS) teams, J-PAL staff, and UCSD researchers discuss their efforts to explore innovative evaluation possibilities aimed at strengthening the implementation of the Climate Action...

J-PAL North America launches Economic Pathways, a targeted effort to empower the next generation of economists researching critical policy questions.

The past year made it clear that we need to learn to live with this pandemic but not its terrible impact. As vaccines rolled out, field research began to resume and demand soared for evidence-based policy solutions to help people recover from the unprecedented economic shocks of Covid-19.

As we enter J-PAL’s third decade, there is no shortage of challenges: Climate change, humanitarian crises, persistent bias and discrimination, and lagging early childhood development are all sobering reminders of how much urgent work there is still to do.

Celebrating our twentieth anniversary around the world over the past year was a welcome opportunity to take stock of J-PAL’s journey so far—a journey that saw us expand our research network from 8 to 900 researchers, learn from 2,200 randomized evaluations across 96 countries, and reach 600 million...

2024 has been a particularly challenging year, with multiple global conflicts, deep human suffering, and worsening climate change. But it has also been a pivotal year, marked by many consequential elections and the rapid realization of AI's potential to reshape our world. As political and...

This is the first blog post in a series designed to help implementers, policymakers, and funders unpack the different types of evaluations relevant for “AI for Good” applications. Stay tuned for forthcoming posts providing a deeper dive on each of the evaluation levels.

This post discusses an evaluation design by researchers at J-PAL North America and Pursuit to measure the impact of the Pursuit's sectoral employment program, showing how randomization can be integrated into the application process without compromising enrollment preferences.