Economics Detective Radio

My guests for this episode are Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester of the Cato Institute. Our topic is a working paper they recently published titled How Mass Immigration Affects Countries with Weak Economic Institutions: A Natural Experiment in Jordan. The abstract reads as follows: Saddam Hussein’s unexpected 1990 invasion of Kuwait forced 300, 000 Kuwaitis of Palestinian descent to flee into Jordan. By 1991, this large exogenous population shock increased Jordan’s population by about 10 percent. Jordanian law allowed these refugees to work, live, and vote in Jordan immediately upon entry. The refugees did not bring social capital that eroded Jordan’s institutions. On the contrary, we find that Jordan’s economic institutions substantially improved in the decade after the refugees arrived. Our empirical methodology employs difference-in-differences and the synthetic control method, both of which indicate that the significant improvement in Jordanian economic institutions would not have happened to the same e