J-PAL North America News: Conducting innovative evaluations in climate and housing

June marks the beginning of wildfire season for many regions in North America, bringing with it increased risk to countless communities' health and safety. One county intimately affected by wildfire season is Jackson County, Oregon, which experienced the most destructive wildfire in Oregon’s recorded history in 2020, destroying nearly 2,600 homes. In the aftermath of this fire, Bob Horton, a fire chief in Jackson County, sought to explore strategies to mitigate wildfire risk using rigorous research. Bob and his team came together with J-PAL North America and J-PAL affiliated researchers to conduct an ongoing randomized evaluation of information and incentives to encourage investment in “defensible spaces”—areas around homes designed to reduce fire danger.?

This research partnership is one of the first to use a randomized evaluation to study wildfire risk mitigation strategies. J-PAL North America is built on a foundation of firsts—my own origin story starts with the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, the first randomized evaluation of the impact of Medicaid. That experiment laid the groundwork for founding J-PAL North America with a core mission of encouraging and supporting randomized evaluations of important policy questions to alleviate poverty. After ten years of partnership building and catalytic funding, we’re continuing to push the bounds of how and where randomized evaluations can be leveraged to improve lives, as demonstrated by the examples in this newsletter. In addition to our feature on the Jackson County study, we highlight new research results on the impact of emergency rental assistance which, similar to the Oregon Experiment, leveraged government-administered lotteries in its randomization procedure.?

I—alongside the entire J-PAL North America team—am always excited to support researchers and partners aiming to address the most pressing issues facing our communities today. I encourage you to reach out with any questions or innovative ideas for leveraging rigorous research in our collective effort to alleviate poverty.?

Amy Finkelstein | Co-Scientific Director, J-PAL North America?

Read more:

• In a new blog post, Deputy Director of the Western Fire Chiefs Association and former Fire Chief Bob Horton discuss the research partnership with researchers in the J-PAL network to evaluate wildfire risk mitigation interventions.
• New research results report the effects of emergency rental assistance (ERA) during the pandemic, leveraging applications to ERA lotteries in four cities.

Media mentions:

MIT News: A modest intervention that helps low-income families beat the poverty trap