The Government of Jordan estimates that around 1.3 million Syrian refugees have arrived in the country since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, of whom 660,000 have registered with UNHCR. This paper estimates the effect of a program to assist Syrian refugees and...
JDC Literature Review
Life out of the Shadows: Impacts of Amnesties in the Lives of Refugees
This paper estimates the causal effects on wellbeing of a regularization program offered to half a million undocumented Venezuelan migrants in Colombia. Colombia hosts almost two million Venezuelans displaced abroad. The Permiso Especial de Permanencia (PEP) grants...
The Economic Effects of Immigration Pardons: Evidence from Venezuelan Entrepreneurs
This paper analyzes the effect of an immigration pardon on immigrant entrepreneurship, by examining the effect of a pardon granted to about 300,000 undocumented Venezuelan immigrants in Colombia in 2018. Colombia hosts nearly two million Venezuelans, representing...
Attitudes and Policies toward Refugees: Evidence from Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This paper examines the effect of refugee arrivals on attitudes toward immigrants in a global sample of low- and middle-income countries. The authors also explore whether these effects vary across camp and non-camp settings or across situations with progressive and...
Forced Displacement and Asylum Policy in the Developing World
This paper analyzes the correlates of asylum policymaking in low- and middle-income countries, which host more than 85 percent of refugees and asylum seekers globally. The authors also examine the role of de jure policies as pull factors in flows of forced migration....
Global Refugee Work Rights Report
This report assesses refugees’ work rights both in law (de jure) and in practice (de facto) across 51 countries, which together hosted 87 percent of the world’s refugees at the end of 2021. The report also analyses additional factors that are critical to refugees’...
Refugees welcome? Inter-group interaction and host community attitude formation
This paper investigates the role of refugee-host interaction in influencing host community attitudes towards refugees in Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia. The authors also explore the factors, other than contact, that shape attitudes of host communities towards refugees,...
Refugees and foreign direct investment: Quasi-experimental evidence from US resettlements
This article examines the causal effect of refugees resettled in the United State (US) on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows from the US to refugees’ countries of origin, and studies the case of Vietnamese ‘boat people’ who arrived in the US in 1975. Specifically,...
Look who perpetrates violence and where: Explaining variation in forced migration
This paper examines the different determinants of internal and external displacement. The author argues that people flee their homes when the expected utility of leaving exceeds the expected utility of staying, and that in general external displacement is costlier...
Forced Migration, Social Cohesion and Conflict: The 2015 Refugee Inflow in Germany
This paper investigates whether large-scale refugee arrivals in 2015/16 affected social cohesion in Germany. Over one million asylum seekers arrived in Germany between 2014 and 2016. To estimate a causal effect of refugees on social cohesion, the authors exploit the...