My research examines how policy interventions affect people living in fragile and conflict-affected contexts, using rigorous causal identification to generate policy-relevant insights and inform development and humanitarian action. My research explores the political economy of conflict, focusing on the intended and unintended effects of foreign aid and military interventions using large-scale data and causal methods to understand behavior of diverse actors in fragile contexts. My research examines migration dynamics from origin to destination countries, focusing on how journey risks, actual migrant and refugee flows, and labor market integration shape migration decisions and outcomes, combining experimental and observational evidence across diverse contexts. My research in development finance analyzes aid effectiveness and the allocation of reconstruction funds to study how financial inflows shape local economic and political outcomes. My health research examines working environments of community health workers and the impacts of HIV testing and treatment on individual and workforce outcomes, using survey data from Burkina Faso and South Africa.
RESEARCH
OUR CURRENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHTS
© Jens Geldner-Belli
Conflict
Sea-Watch.org (via Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0
Migration
© social projects for the Gambia e.V.
Development Finance
© Dominik Jockers
Health
Projects
Coming to America: Immigration, Political Campaigning, and Polarization
Sea-Watch.org (via Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 4.0
Risk and Rescue
Selected Publications
Foreign Interventions and Community Cohesion in Times of Conflict, Journal of Development Economics, 182, 2026.
Cohesion among Whom? Stayees, Displaced, and Returnees in Conflict Contexts (with Paul Michel, Philip Verwimp, Patricia Justino, and Tilman Brück). Journal of Conflict Resolution 69(1), 3-16, 2025.
Stimulant or Depressant? Resource-Related Income Shocks and Conflict (with Kai Gehring and Stefan Kienberger), Review of Economics and Statistics, 1-19, 2025.
HIV Treatment and Worker Absenteeism: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Large-Scale Health Program in South Africa (with Dominik Jockers, Declan French and Till Bärnighausen), Journal of Health Economics 79, 2021.
Fueling Conflict? (De)Escalation and Bilateral Aid (with Richard Bluhm, Martin Gassebner, and Paul Schaudt), Journal of Applied Econometrics 36 (2): 244–61, 2021.
Aid and Growth: New Evidence Using an Excludable Instrument (with Axel Dreher), Canadian Journal of Economics 53 (3): 1162–98, 2020.
The Effects of Foreign Aid on Refugee Flows (with Axel Dreher and Andreas Fuchs), European Economic Review 112: 127-147, 2019.
Project examines how politicians exploit migration in election campaigns and how donors respond. It uses new US refugee data (1975–2018) and innovative methods.
We study how shocks to migration-journey risks shape decisions, combining Central Mediterranean risk data with a large information-provision experiment in Nigeria.
