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...

Understanding the economic and social effects of the recent global trends of rising market concentration and market power has become a policy priority, particularly in developing countries where markets are often more concentrated. In this context, since the poor are typically the most affected...

The Republic of Yemen has undergone a profound transformation following the escalation of conflict in March 2015. There has been an increase in violence, a disruption in supply chains due to a tightening of the ports, and a decline in the general economic climate that has left a large share of...

Using a high-frequency mobile phone survey of food security conducted by the World Food Programme, this paper investigates how food assistance and access to food changed following the announcement of famine-like conditions in the Republic of Yemen. Among the mobile phone–using population, the...

The paper delves into the implications of a failure to account for rental regulation in the measurement of households' welfare, poverty, and inequality when using household surveys. Exploiting previously unavailable data for the Egyptian case, the paper illustrates the long-lasting distortions...

This paper constructs and tests the robustness of consistently measured poverty trends in the Islamic Republic of Iran after 2008, using international poverty lines based on U.S. dollars at 2011 purchasing power parity. The constructed estimates reveal three distinct periods of welfare in the...

Unemployment rates for tertiary-educated youth in Jordan are high, as is the duration of unemployment. Two randomized experiments in Jordan were used to test different theories that may explain this phenomenon. The first experiment tested the role of search and matching frictions by providing...

Measuring poverty and tracking it over time is an important prerequisite to national economic planning. Absence of official data on household expenditure or poverty line hampered the ability of Iraqi policymakers to understand the extent of the problem, analyze their causes, and devise...

The paper delves into the implications of a failure to account for rental regulation in the measurement of households' welfare, poverty, and inequality when using household surveys. Exploiting previously unavailable data for the Egyptian case, the paper illustrates the long-lasting distortions...