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IZA Discussion Paper No. 18879
August 2026
Unexpected Work Incentives: How Cash Transfers Raise Refugee Men's Labor Supply

A central concern with humanitarian assistance is that unconditional cash transfers might discourage work. Yet refugees differ from the chronically poor in most cash-transfer studies: many retain skills that transfers might help reactivate. We study the world's largest humanitarian cash transfer scheme, the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) in Turkey, which long hosted more refugees than any other country. Using a survey representative of the refugee population, we exploit the program's dependency-ratio eligibility rule in a regression discontinuity design. Far from discouraging work, cash transfers increase the probability that any man in the household works by 13.2 and the share of working men by 19.3 percentage points. We find no evidence of an effect on women's already-low labor supply. A design-based local-randomization analysis with exact finite-sample inference corroborates these effects (9.8 and 17.4 percentage points). Transfers also improve access to information, reduce reliance on harmful food-coping strategies, and raise Turkish-language course enrollment and education spending. These patterns suggest transfers relax the liquidity and information constraints refugees face rather than inducing a shift toward leisure.

Kommunikation
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer-ext@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Netzwerkkoordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

Das IZA@LISER-Netzwerk ist eine weltweite Gemeinschaft für exzellente Forschung in der Arbeitsmarktökonomie und angrenzenden Fachgebieten. Nach dem Wechsel von Bonn wird das Netzwerk nun am Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) koordiniert.

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