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Significance The number of refugees displaced by civil conflict or natural disasters is on the rise. Economic impacts of refugees on host countries are controversial and little understood, because data have not been available and the question of refugee impacts does not lend itself to conventional impact evaluation methods. We use a unique Monte Carlo simulation approach with microdata from refugee and host-country surveys to obtain the first estimates of refugee camps’ impacts on surrounding host-country economies and to compare impacts of cash versus in-kind refugee aid. An additional refugee increases total real income within a 10-km radius around two cash camps by significantly more than the aid the refugee receives. Impacts around a camp receiving in-kind (food) aid are smaller.

J. Edward Taylor and Mateusz J. Filipski provide readers with a methodology to evaluate the impacts of a wide diversity of development projects and policies on local economies, together with a diversity of applications of these tools - from poverty programs to global price shocks, irrigation projects, eco-tourism, migration, production subsidies, and government corruption.

(.) This paper presents a methodology to understand the full impact of cash transfers on local economies, including on the production activities of both beneficiary and non-beneficiary groups; how these effects change when programmes are scaled up to larger regions; and why these effects happen. All of these are important for designing projects and explaining their likely impacts to governments and other sponsoring agencies. The simulation methods presented here are not a substitute for good impact evaluations. Experimental findings are important to test and quantify the likely impacts of interventions on beneficiary households and, under some conditions, on ineligible households. They can also help validate some of the predictions of simulation models and, in some cases, improve the accuracy of model parameters. Validation is a strength of conventional experimental methods but a major concern in GE modelling. We econometrically estimate the LEWIE model parameters and use Monte Carlo methods to perform significance tests and construct confidence intervals around project impact simulation results. We believe that this is an important step towards providing simulation impact evaluation with validation tools that are largely absent in the GE literature.

The conquests of Alexander III ("The Great") transformed the economic as well as political landscape of ancient Greece and Persia. It produced a prolific coinage, part of which survives today. This paper uses a hedonic price modeling approach to analyze auction prices of the major coin type of Alexander the Great. The findings make it possible to identify the effects of specific coin characteristics on realized auction prices, sellers' reservation prices (auction price estimates), discrepancies between realized and estimated prices, and the variability of auction prices around predicted prices, or auction price surprise. The findings reveal that similar considerations shape estimated and realized prices, but bidders consistently value positive coin characteristics more highly than do sellers. Realized auction prices, the difference between realized and estimated prices, and auction price surprise are increasing over time, particularly for the highest grade coins.

In 1995, international migrant remittances exceeded US$70 billion. How have these remittances shaped development in migrant sending areas?Pessimistic views on migration and development pervade the literature. In contrast, the new economics of labour migration (NELM) argues that migration may set in motion a development dynamic, lessening production and investment constraints faced by households in imperfect market environments and creating income growth linkages.This article assesses the development potential of remittances from a NELM perspective and cites empirical evidence that remittances may be a positive factor in economic development.Governments in migrant origin countries may increase the development potential of remittances through a variety of economic policies. Creating a fertile ground for remittances to contribute to broad based income growth in migrant sending areas is a key to promoting development from migration.

The Farm Labor Problem: A Global Perspective explores the unique character of agricultural labor markets and the implications for food production, farm worker welfare and advocacy, and immigration policy. Agricultural labor markets differ from other labor markets in fundamental ways related to seasonality and uncertainty, and they evolve differently than other labor markets as economies develop. We weave economic analysis with the history of agricultural labor markets using data and real-world events. The farm labor history of California and the United States is particularly rich, so it plays a central role in the book, but the book has a global perspective ensuring its relevance to Europe and high-income Asian countries. The chapters in this book provide readers with the basics for understanding how farm labor markets work (labor in agricultural household models, farm labor supply and demand, spatial market equilibria); farm labor and immigration policy; farm labor organizing; farm employment and rural poverty; unionization and the United Farm Workers movement; the Fair Food Program as a new approach to collective bargaining; the declining immigrant farm labor supply; and what economic development in relatively low-income countries portends for the future of agriculture in the United States and other high-income countries. The book concludes with a chapter called "Robots in the Fields," which extrapolates current trends to a perhaps not-so-distant future. The Farm Labor Problem serves as both a guide to policy makers, farmworker advocates and international development organizations and as a textbook for students of agricultural economics and economics