Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab

Last updated
Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
FoundedJune 2003
TypeAcademic center
FocusRandomized impact evaluation in areas including Microfinance, Public Health, Agriculture, and more; training and capacity building; policy outreach
Location
Origins Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Area served
Global
Key people
Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Benjamin Olken, Iqbal Dhaliwal
Website www.povertyactionlab.org

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center working to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence. J-PAL conducts randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty, and builds partnerships with governments, NGOs, donors, and others to generate new research, share knowledge, and scale up effective programs. [1]

Contents

History and mission

J-PAL was founded in 2003 as the "Poverty Action Lab" by professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan. J-PAL was established to support randomized evaluations measuring interventions against poverty on topics ranging from agriculture and health to governance and education. The Lab was renamed in honor of Sheikh Abdul Latif Jameel when his son, MIT alumnus Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, supported it with three major endowments in 2005. [2] He further endowed its activities in 2009. [3]

A 2010 Business Week story, "The Pragmatic Rebels", termed J-PAL's approach that of "a new breed of skeptical empiricists committed to assiduous testing and tangible results". [4] According to Nicolas Kristof, J-PAL has led a "revolution in evaluation"; [5] its philosophy and methods are part of a larger trend towards "applying behavioral economics to global development." [1] In his review of Banerjee and Duflo's book Poor Economics , Bill Gates wrote: "To me, what's really great about J-PAL is that it's producing scientific evidence that can help make our anti-poverty efforts more effective." [6]

Activities

Although J-PAL was founded as a research center, its activities have expanded to encompass three areas: impact evaluations, policy outreach, and capacity building.

To date, a network of over 170 J-PAL affiliated professors has carried out more than 948 evaluations in 81 countries, and J-PAL has trained over 1,500 people in impact evaluation. [7] [8] These evaluations include everything from an analysis of the effectiveness of glasses in China in improving student test scores [9] to a study on the value of deworming to improve student attendance and academic performance in Kenya. [10] This work, by Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, provided the impetus for the Deworm the World initiative, which has since reached over 20 million children. Another J-PAL researcher, Nava Ashraf, recently completed work on innovative channels to ease the load of overburdened health care workers in Zambia. [11] An evaluation in India by J-PAL Directors Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Rachel Glennerster, together with Dhruva Kothari, found that full immunization rates increased dramatically with the introduction of small incentives for parents, coupled with reliable services at convenient mobile clinics. [12]

As part of its capacity-building efforts, J-PAL offers courses to help implementers, policymakers, and researchers become better producers and users of evidence and equip learners worldwide with skills in data analysis and economics. Offerings include open enrollment courses, custom workshops, online courses, and trainings for research staff. J-PAL has created an online MicroMasters credential in cooperation with MITx and a Diploma in Impact Evaluation with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. [13] In 2019, J-PAL launched the blended MIT Master's in Data, Economics, and Development Policy, combining online learning with residential education at MIT and intensive internships. The master's program will equip outstanding students with the skills they need to create evidence-based change in their communities. [14]

Structure

J-PAL's headquarters (Global office) is a center within the Economics Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with regional offices in Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia that are hosted by a local university:

J-PAL is organized both by these regional offices and by research themes called sector programs. Programs are led by members of the organization's board of directors, and cover eight areas:

J-PAL is currently led by Professors Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Ben Olken as Faculty Directors and Iqbal Dhaliwal as the Global Executive Director. [19] J-PAL's Board of Directors sets the vision and strategy for the organization and includes the Global Directors and executive director, Regional Scientific Directors and executive directors, and Chairs of the Sector Programs. In 2019, J-PAL co-founders Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, and long time research affiliate Michael Kremer were awarded the Nobel prize in economics "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." [20]

Partnerships

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is a close partner of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). The two organizations share a common mission and take similar methodological approaches to development policy evaluation, though J-PAL works through universities and makes use of academic resources, while IPA, as a nonprofit, operates through country offices. Both organizations have pioneered the use of randomized evaluations to study the effectiveness of development interventions worldwide and have collaborated extensively on field studies involving randomized evaluations. A number of J-PAL Affiliates are also IPA Research Affiliates or IPA Research Network Members. The work of both organizations is featured in the popular press books More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel, and in Banerjee and Duflo's 2011 book, Poor Economics, which was chosen as the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. [21]

Other J-PAL research partners include the Centre for Micro Finance, [22] Harvard Kennedy School's Center for International Development's Micro-Development Initiative, the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, Ideas 42, [23] Educate!, [24] the Small Enterprise Finance Center, [25] and the Global Innovation Fund. [26] [27]

Experiments and findings in India

J-PAL has conducted extensive work in India. Below are some examples of experiments and findings in India: [28]

Awards

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sendhil Mullainathan</span> American Professor of Computation and Behavioral science

Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Kremer</span> American economist and Nobel laureate (born 1964)

Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist who is University Professor in Economics And Public Policy at the University of Chicago. He is the founding director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics. Kremer served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University until 2020. In 2019, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esther Duflo</span> French-American economist

Esther Duflo Banerjee, FBA is a French–American economist who is a professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which was established in 2003. She shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abhijit Banerjee</span> Indian economist

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born naturalized American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Banerjee shared the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". He and Esther Duflo, who are married, are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize.

Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is an American non-profit research and policy organization founded in 2002 by economist Dean Karlan. Since its foundation, IPA has worked with over 400 leading academics to conduct over 900 evaluations in 52 countries. The organization also manages the Poverty Probability Index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Seva Mandir</span> Indian grassroot NGO

Seva Mandir is an Indian grassroot NGO based in Udaipur, in Rajasthan state, founded by Dr. Mohan Sinha Mehta in 1968. Seva Mandir works mainly in natural resource development and sustainability, village development, women empowerment, education and health care, continuing education, and children's welfare.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dean Karlan</span> American economist

Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with economists Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, Karlan served as director of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium of researchers focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals.

The Consortium on Financial Systems and Poverty (CFSP) is a private economic research consortium dedicated to studying the interaction of financial systems and poverty, using a variety of economic approaches in a range of developing countries.

The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), earlier known as the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, is a research network based at the University of California that advances global health and development through impact evaluation and economic analysis. The Center's researchers use randomized controlled trials and other rigorous forms of evaluation to promote sustainable social and economic development around the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rachel Glennerster</span>

Rachel Glennerster is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Glennerster served as chief economist for the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, formerly the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK's ministry for international development cooperation, after formerly serving on DFID's Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact. She is an education sector academic co-chair at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). She was the executive director of J-PAL until 2017 and the lead academic for Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre, a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. She helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide.

<i>Poor Economics</i> 2011 non-fiction book by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) is a non-fiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Miguel</span> American economist

Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics in the Department of Economics at University of California, Berkeley, US. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) at U.C. Berkeley.

Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.

Pascaline Dupas is a French economist whose research focuses on development economics and applied microeconomics, with a particular interest in health, education, and savings. She is a professor in economics and public affairs at Princeton University and is a co-chair of the Poverty Action Lab's health sector. She received the Best Young French Economist Prize in 2015.

Rema Hanna is an economist and is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South East Asia Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Moreover, she currently serves as co-director of the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) research programme at Harvard's Center for International Development and a scientific co-director for Southeast Asia at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Her research focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of public services in developing countries, with specific focus on service delivery and the impacts of corruption. She is also the co-chair of the editorial board for the academic journal Review of Economics and Statistics.

<i>Good Economics for Hard Times</i> 2019 nonfiction book by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems is a 2019 nonfiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of economics at MIT. It was published on November 12, 2019 by PublicAffairs (US), Juggernaut Books (India), and Allen Lane (UK). The book draws from recent developments in economics research to argue solutions to the issues facing modern economies and societies around the world, including slowing economic growth, immigration, income inequality, climate change, globalization and technological unemployment. It is their second collaborative book since the publication of their book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) and their first since becoming a married couple in 2015. The book's publication comes a month after Banerjee and Duflo were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Harvard University professor Michael Kremer.

Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.

The 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded jointly to the economist couple Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo-Banerjee and their colleague Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". Banerjee and Duflo are the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel Prize. The pressed release of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences noted:

"The research conducted by this year's Laureates has considerably improved our ability to fight global poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research. They have laid the foundations of the best way to design measures that reduce global poverty"

Tavneet Suri is a Kenyan development economist currently serving as the Louis E. Sheeley Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is a member of the executive committee of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on technology adoption and usage in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Oeindrila Dube is an economist and political scientist serving as the Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of the Crime, Violence, and Conflict Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her research examines the political economy of conflict and development, with a regional focus on Africa and Latin America.

References

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  14. "2018 Annual Report" (PDF). Retrieved 3 June 2019.
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