Works in Progress

This project studies the labor market impacts of the Jordan Compact, which has issued over 300,000 work permits (including renewals) to Syrian refugees in Jordan since 2016. I construct two new datasets of repeated cross-sections to study labor market outcomes for Syrian refugees and Jordanians over time to assess the effects of both labor market shocks on the labor market outcomes of the Jordanian host community as well as Syrian refugees themselves. Work permits reduce aggregate barriers to refugee employment, as seen by a 38% decrease in their unemployment rate, as well as differentially easing barriers to specific sectors, as evidenced by the reallocation of Syrian refugees across occupations over time and the closing wage gap between observably equivalent Syrian refugee and Jordanian workers. To quantify how the introduction of work permits has affected the aggregate allocation of workers across sectors and sector-level wages by group, I estimate a model of occupational choice nested in general equilibrium. 

This project studies how expanding access to labor market opportunities, through work permits, impacts the education decisions of young refugees, growing up in protracted displacement. Using the natural experiment of the Jordan Compact, which has issued over 300,000 work permits to Syrian refugees in Jordan, I assess how educational decisions evolve over time across cohorts in response to decreasing barriers to work. The effect of work permits on education is ambiguous. On the one hand, work permits could improve the returns to education through providing pathways to higher-skilled jobs, increasing educational attainment among refugees. On the other hand, given the high levels of poverty among Syrian refugees, work permits could encourage youths to drop out to work by making jobs easier to access.

While macro models estimate high migration flows in response to climate change, little is known about why individual households migrate. This project studies the climate-driven migration decisions of ultra-poor agrarian households, who are among the most climate-vulnerable, and the role of poverty-alleviation programs in these decisions. Researchers will develop a discrete-choice model of the decision to migrate and apply it to a hallmark poverty-alleviation program: the Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) program. Researchers aim to answer whether UPG programs insure households against climate stress in the short-run, and whether, and how, this deters or enables optimally timed migration to climate-resilient urban areas. To discipline the model, researchers will build on an ongoing J-PAL evaluation of UPG programs in Upper Egypt, by collecting a five-year endline to identify key model parameters.

This project studies the economic consequences of large-scale evictions of slums in the centre of cities, a common practice in the history of rich-country sites and developing-country cities today. In particular, we evaluate an urban redevelopment program that evicted nearly 20,000 households from 20 neighbourhoods in the centre of Addis Ababa in 2017-18. Using a spatial regression discontinuity approach, and rich primary survey data collected before after the program, we estimate the effect of being evicted on evicted households and characterise heterogeneous treatment effects by the type of compensation provided to evicted households. Although households live considerably further from the city centre after their eviction, we find that they move to better neighbors with better housing quality. We can rule out large effects on household earnings and consumption. To address the question of welfare effects of such policies, we collect extensive endline data on social networks, housing amenities, local amenities and travel times, and combine it with model-based money metrics. In the aggregate, we find that eviction is neutral to positive from an economic perspective, but with important social downsides. Next we turn to spillovers, and estimate the effects of exposure to nearby evictions for households that were not evicted. Here we find that households left behind experience reductions in neighbourhood quality and social networks, with no real effects on their economic outcomes.