How does a person’s immigration status shape well-being, integration and opportunities? Immigration status is particularly high-stakes for people fleeing persecution and violence, who may face uncertainty in their ability to reside legally and move freely. Yet there is limited causal evidence on how obtaining refugee status affects refugees’ lives after arrival. In this study, we address this empirical gap by combining administrative UNHCR records linked to an original panel survey of asylum seekers and refugees in Greece conducted between 2022 and 2023. We use a difference-in-differences design to identify the impact of refugee status on labor market outcomes, integration into host communities, psychological distress and onward migration. We find that obtaining refugee status from the Greek state reduces psychological distress and improves overall integration, with the effects being mostly driven by navigational integration, while also increasing secondary movements within Europe. These results are robust to a variety of checks and specifications, providing evidence for the multidimensional impact of granting refugee status.
This article proposes a theoretical framework that systematically integrates human rights and economic analysis, addressing gaps in previous attempts linking theory and policy. Rather than developing a new theoretical approach, we work within a standard social planner setting in which a social welfare function embeds both fiscal constraints and rights-based valuations, ensuring Pareto-efficient outcomes while guaranteeing minimum rights. Conceptually, we link principles, policy instruments, and outcomes, highlighting shared structures across disciplines and enabling policy design that balances efficiency, equity, and transparency. Empirically, a case study of universal social protection strategies in South Africa illustrates how economic, human rights, and integrated approaches produce different priorities: targeted basic income maximizes fiscal efficiency, the universal transfer maximizes equality and rights, and the integrated perspective favors the expansion of the existing system as the second-most rights-consistent and most cost efficient option. This fully integrated framework demonstrates that human rights economics is not a slogan, nor merely the economics of human rights or rights within economics, but a true integration of both—practically applicable, context-sensitive, and offering a pathway to fiscally sustainable, socially inclusive, and administratively feasible policies.
Voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) promise consumers that certified products are produced under sustainable conditions. While the literature assessing the effects of VSS has expanded considerably, most studies rely on cross-sectional data, thereby providing only a snapshot in time, and focus on single sustainability dimensions, limiting our understanding of whether improvements in one dimension are accompanied by unintended negative effects in another. Moreover, little is known about the extent to which VSS duration influences outcomes, even though sustainability-related improvements may take time to materialize. Our study addresses these gaps using a three-wave panel dataset from Rwanda’s coffee sector to examine how VSS and their duration are associated with economic and ecological outcomes. We distinguish between state and civil-society VSS, which are developed and monitored by organizations such as governments or NGOs, and industry VSS, which include both company-owned standards and multi-stakeholder initiatives with strong industry involvement. We combine household-, buyer-, and plot-level data and draw on a unique dataset of 844 households, 102 plots and 48 coffee buyers. We find that only state and civil-society certification is positively associated with economic outcomes such as coffee yield, prices, profits and returns to land, while longer certification duration under both VSS types is associated with improvements in most economic outcomes. Ecological results are mixed. While state and civil-society certification and its duration are positively associated with shade tree outcomes, we do not observe similar associations for industry VSS. For both schemes, we find no positive associations with animal diversity outcomes. The findings highlight that VSS should be understood as a long-term process in which sustainability improvements materialize gradually. They also point to current limitations in the ability of VSS to achieve environmental objectives, particularly under industry VSS. More broadly, our findings emphasize the importance of considering time dynamics and multiple sustainability dimensions when assessing VSS effectiveness.
Popular policy arguments indicate freshwater scarcity leads to civil wars. Yet, studies are unclear about this relationship with arguments based on scarcity, abundance, and human adaptation competing. In this article, I clarify this debate by conducting survival analysis with global data from 1960 to 2023. I construct a short-term freshwater shock variable – separated by positive (flood) and negative (drought) – that addresses the methodological limitations of the literature. My results show that both positive and negative shocks increase the likelihood of civil wars but with different temporal patterns. Negative shocks have immediate same-year positive association with conflict hazard, whereas positive shocks have a one-year delay. Interaction models further indicate that this relationship is not moderated by level of democracy, agriculture-dependence, or ethnic division contexts, while arid conditions amplify the hazard from negative shocks. Conclusions indicate policy must accentuate freshwater concerns to mitigate potential civil wars, as climate change brings drastic freshwater crises.
Research on the nexus between development and migration has mainly focused on cross-border flows. How income changes affect migration within developing countries is much less well researched even though addressing this topic might provide essential information about the process of structural transformation needed for economic development. In this paper, we provide new evidence on the link between income growth and internal migration for Malawi, a developing country where migration is predominantly internal. Employing a gravity approach and performing an instrumental variable regression based on a shift-share instrument, we robustly find that, on average, rising incomes – proxied by changes in nightlight intensity – are associated with higher emigration rates. This effect is mainly driven by people emigrating from comparably richer urban areas. In the poorer rural districts, by contrast, migration tends to fall with increasing economic activity, which is in accordance with the notion that poverty may force people to leave their home in response to negative shocks. Our results also suggest a specific sorting pattern: While in urban areas rising incomes mainly facilitate the emigration of lower-skilled people to non-urban destinations, in rural areas it is higher-skilled people who most likely leave their home in response to falling incomes, often moving to urban destinations. This empirical finding is consistent with a standard theoretical model where populations sort themselves geographically on the basis of skills, for which there is relatively higher demand and a higher return in urban areas.
