Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 2019, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was jointly awarded to J-PAL co-founders Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, alongside economist Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty". The Nobel committee highlighted Duflo and Banerjee's work building J-PAL in their report on the scientific background for the award, noting that the organization was "vital" in promoting the acceptance of randomized controlled trials as an empirical technique in development economics. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times has described J-PAL as leading a "revolution in evaluation".
History
J-PAL was founded in 2003 as the "Poverty Action Lab" by Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Sendhil Mullainathan, all of the economics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Initial funding for the research center was approved by MIT economics department chair Bengt Holmström in an effort to convince Duflo and her colleagues to stay in the department despite outside opportunities. The research center was early on championed by MIT president Susan Hockfield, who promoted it to MIT's pool of donors. In 2005, it was endowed by Mohammed Jameel of Saudi Arabia's Abdul Latif Jameel Corporation, and renamed the "Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab ". Subsequently, J-PAL has also received financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Open Philanthropy, Good Ventures, and USAID's Development Innovation Ventures.In 2004, Rachel Glennerster, a British economist and the wife of 2019 Nobel Prize co-laureate Michael Kremer, became executive director of J-PAL. She held the role until 2017, when she became chief economist of the United Kingdom's Department for International Development. In 2018, Iqbal Dhaliwal, a former Indian Administrative Service officer and the husband of former IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath, became J-PAL's new global executive director. Dhaliwal sits on J-PAL's executive committee, which also includes Duflo, Banerjee, Amy Finkelstein, Rema Hanna, Kelsey Jack, Benjamin Olken, and Tavneet Suri.
J-PAL opened its first regional office in 2007 at the Institute for Financial Management and Research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, was the keynote speaker at the launch event. In line with J-PAL's initial focus on South Asia, Many of Duflo and Banerjee's first successful randomized impact evaluations were situated in India. For example, among Duflo's earliest papers is an evaluation of a program in which one third of Village Council head positions in India are randomly reserved for women. The paper finds that councils led by women invest more in roads and drinking water, public goods that they find women are relatively more likely to complain about in formal requests to Gram panchayats. To support work of affiliates in other regions of the world, J-PAL subsequently opened additional hubs in South Africa, Chile, Indonesia, Egypt, France, and the United States, each affiliated with a local university.
In 2011, Duflo and Banerjee promoted the work of J-PAL in their best-selling book Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, which won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award the same year. The Economist praised the book for exemplifying "a more evidence-based approach to development economics", and recommended it as one of the five best texts to read to understand the escape from extreme poverty. William Easterly, a professor of economics at NYU and longstanding critic of foreign aid, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of the book that " have fought to establish a beachhead of honesty and rigor about evidence, evaluation and complexity in an aid world that would prefer to stick to glossy brochures and celebrity photo-ops. For this they deserve to be congratulated—and to be read."
Throughout its history, J-PAL has been a vocal advocate of research transparency, supporting efforts to improve the quality of evidence from randomized controlled trials and ensure results are reproducible. For example, in 2012, J-PAL partnered with the American Economic Association to create a registration service for randomized controlled trials, allowing researchers to pre-register what analysis they hope to conduct before data is collected. This helps to reduce p-hacking, ensuring researchers do not iteratively test many versions of their hypotheses, selecting only those that yield the most desirable results. J-PAL affiliates Rachel Glennerster and Edward Miguel published one of the earliest and highest profile studies to use a "pre-analysis plan", showing that pre-registration effectively prevented them from drawing erroneous conclusions.
In 2019, Duflo and Banerjee were selected as the co-recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, alongside Michael Kremer, then of Harvard University. In their report on the scientific background for the award, the Nobel committee explicitly acknowledged Duflo and Banerjee's work building J-PAL, noting that the organization "has promoted research built on randomized controlled trials in many countries and promoted the acceptance of results from such trials in the economic-policy community."
J-PAL's success has inspired the widespread acceptance of randomized controlled trials in development economics, and has encouraged their use in organizations and by academics outside their network. At approximately the same time as J-PAL was created, Dean Karlan founded Innovations for Poverty Action, an NGO and longstanding partner of J-PAL that also promotes the use of rigorous impact evaluation in development economics. In 2008, Edward Miguel, a development economist and co-author of 2019 Nobel Prize co-laureate Michael Kremer, founded the Center for Effective Global Action at UC Berkeley to pursue a similar goal. J-PAL's success has also inspired successful impact evaluations at multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, in addition to within national governments such as that of Indonesia. In line with qualitative accounts of J-PAL's influence in popularizing experimental research methods, a paper by Janet Currie and co-authors in the papers and proceedings of the American Economic Association observed that the share of NBER working papers leveraging randomized controlled trials increased from less than 5% to almost 15% between 1980 and 2018.