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Comparing Poverty of Refugees and Their Hosts

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 5, 2020 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (PDT)

Marriott Marquis, Grand Ballroom 10
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Paolo Verme, World Bank

The Syrian Refugee Life Study

Samuel Leone
,
University of California-Berkeley
Edward Miguel
,
University of California-Berkeley
Sandra Rozo
,
University of Southern California
Emma Smith
,
Harvard University

Abstract

What is the best way to house refugees? In recent years, some humanitarian agencies have de-emphasized typical “refugee camps” and started placing families directly in host communities. However, we still have little empirical evidence on the positive and negative effects of this new strategy. On the one hand, living in host communities may give refugees access to better education, healthcare, and jobs. On the other hand, anecdotally it seems as though refugees may compete with existing residents for the same housing stock, putting upward pressure on rental prices. To shed light on this tradeoff, we are running a randomized impact evaluation of a prominent NGO’s shelter-assistance program for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We will also pair this experiment with long-term longitudinal data collection to estimate the direct and spillover effects of shelter assistance on refugee beneficiaries and their host communities. To study the effect on the Syrian refugees, we will use a broad range of outcomes to discern the mechanisms by which providing stable shelter access may improve recipients’ economic welfare, as well as their physical and mental health. To study the effect on the Jordanian hosts, we will use price surveys, alongside a novel saturation research design, to estimate causal spillover effects of aid on host-community welfare.

Collecting Representative Panel Data in a Refugee Setting- Evidence from Bangladesh

C. Austin Davis
,
American University
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak
,
Yale University
Paula López-Peña
,
Yale University

Abstract

Large-scale humanitarian crises demand the rapid allocation of assistance, often without the benefit of deep, comprehensive measures of wellbeing. Using novel panel survey of hosts and recently arrived refugees in Southern Bangladesh, we conduct three analyses to inform humanitarian responses broadly. First, we provide a comprehensive description of the wellbeing of host and refugee communities, including consumption, livelihoods, and health. Second, we show that cross-survey imputation between our panel and administrative and census-type data from humanitarian actors successfully identifies easy-to-observe predictors of need, which can be used to effectively target assistance. Finally, differences in exposure to, say, seasonal or natural disaster risk between host and refugee communities, may have important implications for the distribution of assistance. As such, we assess the volatility of wellbeing in each community using two waves of the panel data.

Is Imputing Poverty Efficient? An Example from Refugee Data in Chad

Theresa Beltramo
,
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
Ibrahima Sarr
,
World Bank
Paolo Verme
,
World Bank
Hai-Anh Deng
,
World Bank

Abstract

Collecting household survey data on refugees remains a challenge, at least in the foreseeable future, for various logistical and technical reasons. We address this challenge by applying cross-survey imputation methods to a combined survey and UNHCR census-type dataset to predict the welfare of refugees in Chad. Our proposed cross-survey imputation method offers poverty estimates that fall within a 95% margin of the true rate. This result is robust to different poverty lines, sets of regressors, and modelling assumptions of the error term. The method also outperforms widely used methods such as Proxy Means Tests (PMT) and the targeting method currently used by humanitarian organizations in Chad, although the latter performs surprisingly well given its simplicity.
Discussant(s)
Giacomo De Giorgi
,
University of Geneva
Giovanni Peri
,
University of California-Davis
JEL Classifications
  • D6 - Welfare Economics
  • O2 - Development Planning and Policy