PRFDHR Seminar: Impacts of a Refugee Shelter Program: Experimental Evidence from the Syrian Refugee Life Survey, Professor Edward Miguel

Event time: 
Tuesday, May 4, 2021 - 2:30pm to 3:45pm
Location: 
Online See map
https://tinyurl.com/RefugeeShelterProgram
Event description: 

With a record number of refugees moving across the globe, there is much debate among policymakers and academics on how best to provide for refugees’ humanitarian needs while also ensuring the stability of host countries’ political and economic institutions and preventing radicalization among affected groups. As a result, many non-profits and intergovernmental organizations have come together to implement programs that support both refugees and host communities. The Syrian Refugee Life Study (S-RLS) uses a randomized control trial to evaluate the effectiveness of one such specific, scalable program — the Norwegian Refugee Council Jordan’s Urban Shelter Program. This evaluation estimates the direct and spillover effects of shelter assistance on beneficiaries, their children, and their host communities. The study will pair this novel RCT with long-term longitudinal data collection in one of the first systematic efforts to survey a large, representative refugee sample and follow that sample over time. The talk will present initial findings from this ongoing study.
Edward Miguel is the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the Department of Economics and Faculty Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, is on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science and has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, He is the recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize. He was also the 2002 Berkeley Hellman Fellow and received membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.
Professor Miguel’s main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. Professor Miguel has published extensively articles and chapters in leading academic journals and collected volumes. He is the author of three books: Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations, and Africa’s Turn? Professor Miguel has received numerous awards for teaching at U.C. Berkeley and has served on numerous doctoral dissertation committees.

Admission: 
Free but register in advance
https://tinyurl.com/RefugeeShelterProgram