Global Poverty Research Lab

GPRL accelerates poverty reduction by generating frontier research and creating public goods that enable others to design, test, and turn evidence into action.

Extreme poverty fell sharply between 1990 and 2019, from nearly 2 billion people to about 650 million. But progress has since stalled, and poverty is increasingly concentrated in places facing fragility, climate stress, and conflict.

Solving this requires close collaboration between civil society, governments, firms, researchers, practitioners, and donors, groups that often operate under different incentives. Academic journals reward novelty. Funders often chase the next big innovation. Yet everyone ultimately needs the same thing: reliable, shared resources they can trust and use to understand and address poverty.

That conviction led Northwestern University to launch the Global Poverty Research Lab (GPRL) in 2017.

GPRL pushes the research frontier by linking theory-driven questions and advanced econometrics with deep partnerships in local communities. We generate new evidence, often through randomized controlled trials, and build shared public goods for researchers, implementers, policymakers, and donors alike.

Four values guide this work:

• Open-source and transparent. We publish our data, code, and tools.

• Intellectually honest. We learn as much from failures as from successes.

• Interdisciplinary. We believe economists have much to gain from collaborating across fields.

• Field-grounded. We partner with local institutions and stakeholders to identify and test ideas that drive real-world impact.

These values trace back to our founders, Dean Karlan and Christopher Udry, whose work has long focused on improving development research and evidence use, so the wider community can measure better, learn faster, and invest in the most cost-effective ways to reduce poverty worldwide.