projects

[1] Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS) Bangladesh With Dev Patel (Harvard), Carlos Schmidt-Padilla (UC Berkeley), Harsha Thirumurthy (UPenn), Catalina Udani (UPenn), and Nudrat Faria

Description B-PEMS is a five-year (2022-2027), $7.9 million collaborative project between Winrock International and PDRI-DevLab. The project is funded by the US Department of State’s Program to End Modern Slavery (PEMS). The project’s primary goal is to reduce the prevalence of Trafficking in Persons in Bangladeshi farming and fishing households vulnerable to climate change. Winrock International provides technical assistance to farmers, fishers, and fish farmers in climate-change affected regions to conduct climate-smart agriculture and aquaculture and to link them to skills training, job placement, and micro-enterprise development for alternative livelihoods. Using a randomized controlled trial (RCT) study design, we are evaluating the effect of Winrock’s community-level activities on the prevalence of climate change-induced human trafficking and associated risk factors.


[2] Planning for Productive Migration (PPM) in Niger With Jeremy Weinstein (Harvard), Darin Christensen (UCLA), Allison Grossman (Tulane), Jessica Sadye Wolff (Stanford, IPL), and Jon Kurtz (Mercy Corps)

Description In collaboration with Mercy Corps and Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab (IPL), the Planning for Productive Migration (PPM) innovation is a holistic program designed to support households in exploring utilizing domestic and regional temporary migration opportunities to diversify livelihoods. It includes access to advice on employment opportunities, information on legal rights and requirements and network ties in destination markets, facilitation of household planning to ensure collective decision-making, support to secure requisite paperwork, advice on low-cost remittance transfers, soft skills training, cash to cover the cost of travel, and support for migrants while away from home. Overall, our research activities seek to generate evidence around how to increase the uptake of internal and regional migration opportunities, maximize the returns to migration for individuals and families, and promote safer migration by mitigating key risks.


[3] Evaluating scalable approaches to reducing sexual violence towards children in Liberia With Alex Hartman (UCL) and Cecilia Mo (UC Berkeley)

Description Funded by the Fund for Innovation in Development (FID), this collaborative project seeks to develop and evaluate an innovative child protection program to minimize risks of transactional sex involving children and sexual violence towards children in Liberia. The intervention, implemented by World Hope International (WHI), consists of a child-friendly flipchart and associated curriculum delivered to middle school children, teachers, and staff, focusing on bodily autonomy, identifying inappropriate behavior, and how to report incidents. This curriculum is supplemented by activities to improve both schools' and communities' ability to prevent and respond to sexual violence towards children (including, but not limited to, transactional sex). Using an RCT study design, we are evaluating WHI's activities on children's awareness of sexual violence and victimization, as well as communities' norms regarding transactional sex with minors.


[4] Broadcasting Tolerance in Kenya With Erik Wibbels (UPenn), Yotam Margalit (Tel Aviv University and King’s College), and Carolina Torreblanca (UPenn)

Description In 2023, 1.5% of the world's population (117.3 million) was forcibly displaced, nearly doubling the rate from a decade ago. The majority of the displaced are hosted in the Global South, where the surge of refugees and asylum seekers places considerable strain on host communities already facing resource constraints, exacerbating socio-economic disparities and fueling tensions and resentment. Focusing on Kenya, our study tests a highly scalable intervention designed to increase the acceptance of refugees and support for inclusive refugee policies through a serialized radio drama featuring relatable refugee characters. The radio show is explicitly designed to foster empathy and increase support for inclusive refugee policies by employing messaging and plot lines informed by social psychological theories, such as perspective-taking. We are using three sources of exogenous variation to evaluate this intervention across Kenyan villages with varying radio coverage and listener engagement levels, thereby contributing valuable insights to global efforts toward effective refugee integration and social cohesion.


[5] Disrupted Aid, Displaced Lives: Unraveling the Impact of Refugee Funding Cuts in Uganda With Yang-Yang Zhou (Dartmouth) and Shelby Carvalho (Harvard)

Description Funded by the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Innovations for Poverty Action’s Lab Displaced Livelihoods Initiative(DLI), Penn Global Research and Engagement Grant Program, and in collaboration with UNHCR, this project studies the effects of a dramatic drop in the level of support for refugees. In the summer of 2023, UNHCR and the World Food Programme (WFP) launched a new policy in Uganda that reduces unconditional cash and in-kind transfers for 1.5 million refugees. We are using an innovative regression discontinuity study design to evaluate the effects of these aid cuts on refugees’ welfare and livelihood adaptation strategies. As budgetary cuts are anticipated in multiple refugee-hosting contexts, this research will inform policymakers on the effects of funding withdrawal and contribute to the extensive literature on cash transfers.


[6] Return Migration: Reducing Barriers and Risks for Social Cohesion in South Sudan With Erik Wibbels (UPenn), Kyilah Terry (UPenn)

Description Funded by Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and Penn's Making a Difference in Global Communities grant, and in collaboration with the Sudd Institute and UNHCR, this exploratory study examines the social cohesion implications of South Sudanese refugees returning from Uganda and Sudan. It also addresses the additional challenges of hosting refugees from Sudan and proposes potential interventions to reduce tensions within and between communities. The study aims to provide actionable insights tailored to the local context for policymakers, humanitarian organizations, and community leaders, along with a menu of possible interventions to promote peaceful coexistence amidst displacement challenges.


[7] Credit Access for Responsible Extraction: Providing Incentives to Address Exploitation and Externalities in Sierra Leone’s Artisanal Mining Sector With Darin Christensen (UCLA) and Cecilia Mo (UC Berkeley)

Description This pilot study, funded by IPA's HTRI, addresses the need for formal finance for artisanal and small-scale gold miners in Sierra Leone. In partnership with the local microfinance institution Munafa, we are developing an intervention using conditional credit to tackle livelihood vulnerabilities in this sector. The pilot assesses whether providing artisan miners with low-interest loans can reduce exploitation (including debt bondage) and promote ethical labor practices. Insights gained will inform a more extensive study involving rolling out the credit product and rigorously evaluating its impact on trafficking, miners' and mine workers' socio-economic conditions, and environmental hazards.


[8] Does the hidden college contribute to a gender gap in academic success? With Sandra González-Bailón (UPenn), William Dinneen (UPenn), and Shuning Ge (MIT)

Description Across disciplines, a gender gap in academic success---measured as the number of publications, journal placement, and citation counts---has long been documented. A parallel Scientometrics literature has documented the substantial importance of embeddedness in informal professional networks for academic success, using acknowledgments in publications as novel measures of such embeddedness. Combining these hitherto disjoint strands of research, we investigate 1) the effect of embeddedness in informal collaboration networks on academic success; 2) whether gender differences in network embeddedness exist; and ultimately 3) the extent to which informal collaboration network embeddedness can account for gender gaps in academic success. To explore these questions, we collected detailed information on 95,662 unique scholars (including both authors and commentors) from 152,580 peer-reviewed articles published in 185 political science journals from 2003 to 2023. We construct network measures at both the ego-centric and meso-scale levels to capture scholars’ positions in political science's informal collaboration network. With this project, we improve our understanding of academic gender disparities as well as of the gendered nature of network embeddedness as a correlate of academic success.