Behavior

During protracted displacement, women and girls often face serious gender-specific challenges and vulnerabilities, including adverse norms and institutional barriers. Using survey data from 18,533 displaced and non-displaced individuals in El Fasher, Sudan, we document that livelihoods are significantly shaped by a strong and complex intersectionality between long-term displacement and gender. IDP women work more (including […]

Fragile Lives 2024 was the first edition of a new annual expert conference aimed at discussing the role of scientific evidence in shaping policies for fragile and conflict-affected areas. Throughout the event, held on 1 and 2 October 2024 at Humboldt University of Berlin, representatives from academia, policy, and practice explored how poly-crises, where violent […]

This project will focus on collecting the 7th wave of the LiK survey, including a household childcare module, in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank, which provides co-funding for data collection.

In this project, we will collect and analyse Life in Kyrgyzstan panel survey data to study climate change adaptation, food security, and energy transition among Kyrgyz households, especially in rural areas.

Registration is now open for the international expert conference ‘Fragile Lives 2024‘! The conference, which will take place on 1-2 October 2024, will host a unique mix of experts from academia, policy, and practice speaking on the cutting edge of research and programming on three themes: Key speakers include: Beyond that, the conference will include […]

The Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF) is a tool developed by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in Jordan to track changes in refugees’ living situation over time. In 2023, ISDC was tasked with supporting the development of a new module to this framework that can measure climate vulnerability: the climate change vulnerability index. This index would […]

Strengthening social protection in complex humanitarian settings is a top priority for policy-makers and practitioners. This project will generate relevant evidence from two reseach studies.

Every year, the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) hosts a conference brings together actors from across the development economics community to present and discuss research on Africa. This year, ISDC was represented by Behavior Research Program Director Wolfgang Stojetz and Dorothee Weiffen from our Welfare Research Program. Each presented a research paper […]

We study how the stringency of policy measures to counter the COVID-19 pandemic affects individuals’ trust in formal institutions. Drawing on micro-level panel data from Germany spanning an 18-month period from the onset of the pandemic, we show that, on average, there is a pronounced negative relationship between the stringency level of COVID-19 countermeasures and […]

Mental health risks are high in conflict settings, but mental health research mostly focuses on non-conflict settings. Survey data from active conflict settings often suffer from low response rates, unrepresentative samples, and a lack of detailed information on the roots and implications of poor mental health. We overcome these challenges by analyzing nationally representative evidence […]

This paper provides empirical microlevel evidence on the gendered impacts of armed conflict on economic activity in agriculture and other sectors, combining large-N sex-disaggregated survey data with temporally and spatially disaggregated conflict event data from 29 African countries.

To enhance the understanding of how food systems respond to shocks and to inform public policy that can strengthen their capacity to manage such crises, this project aims to develop an analytical framework specifically tailored to measure food system resilience in fragile situations, using Sudan as a case study.

In this project, we study the gendered long-term impacts of conflict exposure on social behavior and economic well-being among Iraqi and Syrian refugees in Jordan.

This research aims to delve into the intersection of armed conflict and climate change, exploring how conflict and climate events jointly shape socio-economic outcomes with a particular focus on gender and age disparities.

This comprehensive report provides an in-depth analysis of the UNHCR’s efforts to address the needs of refugees and other displaced persons.

ISDC is helping UNHCR Jordan to develop a climate change vulnerability index for refugees based on household survey data. This index will plug into UNHCR’s existing Vulnerability Assessment Framework (VAF).

Globally, one in three women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) over their lifetimes. Yet, the factors that cause men to commit IPV remain poorly understood. We propose and test a causal long-term link from past exposure to gender-based collective violence to violent behavior against an intimate partner. Combining novel survey data from Angolan war veteran […]

This paper analyzes how the intersectionality of gender, forced displacement, and collective violence shapes coping behaviors in conflict crises, paying particular attention to household composition by gender and age. Drawing on survey data from 17,951 individuals in North-east Nigeria, the analysis finds that coping behaviors at the household, adult, and child levels are interlinked and […]

More than half of the adult population in the West Bank and Gaza screen positive for depression. In Gaza specifically, the rate climbs to 71%. This is shown in the new report Mental Health in the West Bank and Gaza – a joint effort by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the World Bank, […]

In crises situations, many actors aim to support people and communities. These efforts range from short-term humanitarian assistance to longer-term development assistance. Traditionally, different actors have focused on different missions. More recently, UNHCR has strengthened its commitment to humanitarian-development cooperation, aiming to create synergies between these different support modalities. The expected benefits include stronger inclusion […]

This project studies the impacts of a social safety net intervention in refugee and their host communities of the Republic of Congo. The intervention intends to provide 4,000 vulnerable with regular conditional cash transfers and 8,000 households with support for income generating activities intended to increase stable revenues. The project will estimate causal impacts of […]