A. 1 Introduction This P01 plans one core designed to a) strengthen the quality of the individual projects by enhancing collaboration between researchers and providing common technical resources, and b) help generate wider lessons by enabling comparisons across projects. Specifically, the core will strengthen the individual projects by: a) providing central management support to all the projects in the P01; b) giving researchers access to a first-rate advisory committee; c) promoting collaboration and feedback throughout the entire research process among all researchers involved in the four projects as well as from the advisory committee and others working on health within J-PAL; d) sharing expertise and experience on practical steps to achieve good data quality; e) providing access to relevant public health and medical expertise to the projects that would be hard for them to acquire on an individual basis;and f) helping with development and registration of analysis protocols prior to analysis to prevent data mining and insure meaningful analysis testing. The specific elements that will provide crosscutting learnings are: a) improved comparability of results through coordination on a set of high quality health indicators, and common measures for costings; b) development of comparative cost effectiveness measures across projects; c) drawing out common lessons on how and when people respond to positive and negative prices with respect to the take-up of a basic package of cost-effective prevention measures; d) coordinated policy dissemination of joint lessons; e) dissemination to research community;and f) dissemination of data sets generated by the P01 to the research community. The core will be directed by Esther Duflo?for whom, as the director of J-PAL, this P01 will represent one of her main responsibilities alongside her teaching responsibilities. Administrative and managerial assistance will be provided by a J-PAL program administrator. J-PAL's executive director, Rachel Glennerster, will, along with Esther Duflo, take responsibility for leading the policy dissemination effort. Dr. Khan and Dr. Sharma will be responsible for ensuring that the projects take on board the lessons from the public health and medical literature, and that data is collected in line with appropriate medical protocols. Most of the objectives, however, will be achieved through the joint work of the Pis and advisory committee under the direction of Esther Duflo through regular, structured collaborative meetings. Elements that strengthen the individual projects through provision of common resources a) Provide central management support to all the projects of the POI The management tasks of the P01 will be coordinated through a single program administrator based at J-PAL in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The J-PAL program administrator will work under the supervision of program director Esther Duflo. The responsibilities of the program administrator will include liaising between the U.S.-based and field-based teams, managing projects'finances, setting up subawards, and assisting the Pis with institutional review board applications (in countries, at MIT, and in their respective institutions). They would also be responsible for coordinating the logistics of the semiannual meetings, organizing travel for the advisory committee and researchers, and circulation of papers, under the direction of Esther Duflo (who will be responsible, with advice from the steering committee, for selecting other J-PAL teams to attend some of the semiannual meetings).
