The instability and informality that characterize hybrid political orders and its effects on entrepreneurs remains largely unexplored in the scholarly literatures. In this paper we provide initial findings from the case of entrepreneurs' access to electricity in Lebanon. Using quantitative and...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of domestic workers' employment using a unique micro-level dataset on Lebanese households drawn from the National Household Budget Survey (2005) conducted by Central Administration of Statistics (CAS). Controlling for household, household...

This paper studies the determinants of youth emigration decisions, which is considered to be one of the main causes of 'Brain Drain' in Arab Mediterranean Countries (AMCs). We focus on the case of Lebanon using a unique dataset covering young people aged 15 to 29 from the year 2016. The aim of...

This paper uses the 2013 World Value Survey, as well as the 2016 and 2018 waves of the Arab Barometer, to analyze the dynamics of trust in public institutions in Lebanon. It finds strong evidence that confidence in most public institutions has decreased between 2013 and 2016. The evidence of...

Lebanon is the country with the highest density of refugees in the world, raising the question of whether the host and refugee populations can cooperate harmoniously. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in Lebanon studying intra- and inter-group behavior of Syrian refugees and Lebanese...

An estimated 40 percent of the world's garbage is burned in open-air fires, which are responsible for as much as half of the global emissions of some pollutants. However, there is little evidence on the health consequences of open-air waste burning. In this paper, we estimate the effect of in...

Religious divisions have long played a primary role in major conflicts throughout much of the world. Intergroup contact may increase trust between members of different religions. However, evidence on how inter-religious contact affects individuals' behavior towards one another is scarce. We...

The economic expansion of the late 1990s created many opportunities for business creation in Silicon Valley, but the opportunity cost of starting a business was also high during this period because of the exceptionally tight labor market. A new measure of entrepreneurship derived from matching...

In this paper, we investigate the use of interactive effect or linear factor models in regional policy evaluation. We contrast treatment effect estimates obtained by Bai (2009)'s least squares method with the popular difference in difference estimates as well as with estimates obtained using...

We exploit the bilateral and skill dimensions from recent data sets of international migration to test for the existence of Zipf's and Gibrat's Laws in the context of aggregate and high-skilled international immigration and emigration using graphical, parametric and non-parametric analysis. The...