Distributional preference divergence in targeting foreign aid: Experimental evidence from aid workers, refugees, and a proxy means test in a humanitarian setting

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Aid institutions delivering social assistance balance donors’ conceptions of appropriate program design with the need to maintain legitimacy among local beneficiaries. We present a conceptual framework for institutional targeting under dual accountability constraints and apply it to the case of cash transfer targeting among Syrian refugees in Lebanon. We recover distributional preferences for beneficiary selection in a discrete choice conjoint experiment given to humanitarian staff and refugees, and extract implicit preferences from the econometric proxy means test used in practice. Human respondents prioritize visible forms of vulnerability, while formal targeting models emphasize demographic predictors of expenditure. We find that donor compliance pressures outweigh legitimacy costs in shaping institutional behavior. The paper contributes to debates on governance, accountability, and institutional legitimacy in humanitarian and foreign aid settings.

Testing Threshold Criteria for Return Migration: A Survey with Forcibly Displaced Venezuelans

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Standard economic models treat migration as a human-capital investment driven mainly by economic returns. Migration under forced displacement is a different decision problem, often governed by whether conditions in the home country cross a minimum threshold of improvement rather than by compensatory tradeoffs across attributes. This project develops and tests a threshold model of return migration, combining classic migration theory with behavioral heuristics of threshold decision-making. Building on qualitative fieldwork with Venezuelan refugees in Colombia, it fields a conjoint survey in which respondents evaluate hypothetical country-condition profiles that vary across political, economic, and social features. The survey measures individual-level thresholds, formalizes a threshold migration framework in the context of the Roy model, and estimates the elasticity of return. The study is pre-registered, with data collection ongoing.

Conjoint Experiment on Stephen D. O'Connell

Distributional preference divergence in targeting foreign aid: Experimental evidence from aid workers, refugees, and a proxy means test in a humanitarian setting

Testing Threshold Criteria for Return Migration: A Survey with Forcibly Displaced Venezuelans