Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper...

Throughout the Middle East, unemployment rates of educated youth have been persistently high and female labor force participation, low. This paper studies the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to assist female community college graduates find employment. One randomly chosen...

Employers around the world complain that youth lack the soft skills needed for success in the workplace. In response, a number of employment programs have begun to incorporate soft skills training, but to date there has been little evidence as to the effectiveness of such programs. This paper...

Perceptions of eroding living standards and low life satisfaction are widespread in the Middle East and North Africa region today, along with pessimism about prospects for economic mobility. Conventional measures of economic well-being offer little in the way of explanation – in most countries...

The Palestinian Territories have a uniquely fragmented geography, characterized by the isolation of Gaza from the rest of the world, and the man-made barriers to mobility within the West Bank. The internal mobility restrictions imposed by Israel, unique to the West Bank, play an important role...

The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper has two main aims. (i) It documents the size and timing of the Syrian refugee influx into Jordan, Lebanon, and Kurdistan, characterizing the forced nature of displacement and exploring factors that influenced...

The Syrian crisis has led to rapid and large-scale population displacement. This paper uses several sources of data, including the United Nations Higher Commissioner for Refugees' registration database and multi-country, multi-topic surveys collected in 2015-16, to characterize service delivery...