Excerpt
March 7, 2023, Paper: "What is the relationship between employment and gender identity? We study this question in the Rohingya refugee camps, the largest refugee camps in the world, and a setting in which pervasive unemployment and strong gender norms characterize daily refugee experience. We involve 2520 married couples in a field experiment, assigning either the husband or wife to one of three interventions relative to a control: cash, volunteering, or gainful employment. We consider how each intervention affects both own and spouse’s wellbeing, exploring channels of individuals’ perception of themselves, engagement with their partner, and relationship with the outside world. By documenting these processes and disentangling the constitutive components of employment into those of receiving an income, performing a productive activity, and earning money for a productive activity, we are able to map the dimensions of employment to distinct policy interventions, each with potentially distinct returns for males and females in our context."