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Research

Working Papers

Stigma and Social Cover: A Mental Health Care Experiment in Refugee Networks
Winner of the Weiss-NEUDC Distinguished Paper Prize 2023
^{AEA Registry | Development Impact Blog}
People may withhold useful information from others to avoid becoming associated with a stigmatized service. A field experiment with 849 Syrian refugee friend groups shows, first, low willingness to share information about mental health services, despite largely accurate knowledge of friends’ need. But giving social cover, by encouraging individuals to disclose they are paid to share information, raises sharing rates by 34%. Effects are strongest for senders who used mental health services previously. Without social cover, senders ration messages to their highest need friends. Social cover led to more sharing from experienced users, generating greater social connectedness and noisy increases in services use.

Opportunity Across Borders? Alleviating Barriers to Remote Work for Refugees
with Pablo Acosta, Layane Alhorr and Alice Danon (author order certified random)
Winner of the Advances with Field Experiments 2026 Fisher Prize
Online work platforms have rapidly drawn over 160 million workers worldwide: does this reflect weak local labor markets, or inflated beliefs about platform earnings? We investigate this with a field experiment offering online freelancing training to refugees and host community members mainly in East Africa. Camp-based refugees, facing tight legal barriers in-person, took up training at nearly twice the rate of hosts. Training raised platform knowledge but did not increase online earnings. Instead, it lowered expectations about online opportunities, and in-person earnings rose meaningfully, indicative of prior misallocation. Gains were only significant for hosts, while refugees, with limited labor market access, reported declining grit and lower online reservation wages. The results suggest information asymmetries may drive over-investment in online platforms, but correcting this friction only resolves misallocation for workers with access to in-person labor markets.

Housing Subsidies for Refugees: Experimental Evidence on Life Outcomes and Social Integration in Jordan
with Abdulrazzak Tamim, I. Bailey Palmer, Edward Miguel, Samuel Leone, Sandra V. Rozo and Sarah Stillman (author order certified random)
^{NBER Working Paper | AEA Registry | Ethics Appendix}
Refugees require assistance for basic needs like housing, but refugee-exclusive assistance may affect relations with host communities. This study experimentally evaluates the effect of a housing assistance program for Syrian refugees in Jordan on both the recipients and their host community neighbors. The program offered full rental subsidies and landlord incentives for housing improvements, but saw only moderate uptake, in part due to landlord reluctance. The program improved short-run housing quality and lowered housing expenditures, but did not yield sustained economic benefits, partly due to redistribution of aid. The program unexpectedly led to a deterioration in child socio-emotional well-being, and also diminished social cohesion between Jordanian neighbors and refugees. In all, housing subsidies had limited measurable benefits for refugee well-being while worsening social cohesion, highlighting the possible need for alternative forms of aid.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Chronic Depression, Child Development and Human Capital among the Forcibly Displaced: Evidence from Syrian Refugees
Journal of Development Economics, 2026
A lack of longitudinal data has largely prevented the detection of chronic depression among refugees and its intergenerational associations. I link three years of parental depression measures to children’s socio-emotional development and school attendance for Syrian refugees in Jordan. First, chronic depression is common, with over a quarter of adults likely depressed in all three survey rounds. Second, the chronicity of likely parental depression is strongly associated with increasing risk of abnormal child socio-emotional development, and both likely depression and abnormal socio-emotional development are associated with lower school attendance. The results point to caregiver behavior and household tensions as a potential mechanism. Chronic depression among a broadly representative sample of refugees appears to be prevalent and related to urgent child development and human capital needs.

The Syrian Refugee Life Study: First Glance
with Edward Miguel, Bailey Palmer, Sandra Rozo, Sarah Stillman and Abdulrazzak Tamim
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2022

Selected Work in Progress

The Cognitive and Economic Impacts of Water Scarcity: Intergenerational Evidence from Jordan
with Lydia Assouad and Giulia Buccione

Conflict, Expectations, and Refugee Human Capital

The Dynamics of Syrian Refugee Return After Regime Change
with Edward Miguel, Sandra Rozo and I. Bailey Palmer

Identifying and Changing Stigma as an Informal Institution: Evidence from Adolescent Health
with Dickens Onyango and Stephanie Bonds

Other Publications

The Syrian Situation: Host Country Effects and the Prospects for Return
with Zara Sarzin
World Bank–UNHCR Joint Data Center Digest (Eleventh Issue), 2026