New WP

The Psychosocial Value of Employment In settings where employment opportunities are scarce, the inability to work may generatepsychosocial harm. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of em-ployment in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. We engage 745 individuals in a fieldexperiment with three arms: (1) a control arm, (2) a weekly cash arm, and (3) a gainful employ-ment arm, in which work is offered and individuals are paid weekly the approximate equivalentof that in the cash arm. We find that employment confers significant psychosocial benefits be-yond the impacts of cash alone, with effects concentrated among males. The cash arm does notimprove psychosocial wellbeing, despite the provision of cash at a weekly amount that is morethan twice the amount held by recipients in savings at baseline. Consistent with these findings,we find that 66% of those in our work treatment are willing to forego cash payments to insteadwork for free. Our results have implications for social protection policies for the unemployed inlow income countries and refugee populations globally.

New link: https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/sp-nexus/documents/paper-psychosocial-value-employment-hussam-et-al-2021