Naturally, they had the perception that their answers would directly impact the amount of aid they received.

(2) Collecting information on a population under constant supervision by aid agencies is challenging. In our study, households were accustomed to being monitored and were well aware of the benefits they were eligible for, as well as the eligibility criteria.

(1) The economic life of refugees is complex and fascinating. It is encouraging to see more papers on this topic. There is still much to learn about the survival strategies of households living in protracted camps settings.

A couple of additional takeaways from that experience working in refugee camps:

The most striking finding is that the cyclical pattern could also be observed in children's nutritional health. As the number of days since the last distribution increased, the short-term nutritional status of children under five also declined.

Average consumption declines at a rate of 1.1 to 1.5 percent per day throughout the distribution cycle, echoing payday cycles observed in high-income country settings (though the magnitude was more pronounced in our study).

The results confirmed our intuition. Consumption indeed responds to the timing of the distribution, indicating that households do not perfectly smooth their consumption between two food distributions.

during the first and third weeks of our survey (the second week being dedicated to households in the host community). This created an exogenous 11-day difference in the time since distribution between the two groups, allowing us to track consumption patterns over the distribution cycle.

With that in mind, we decided to make a last-minute adjustment to our sampling strategy to create an exogenous variation in the time since the latest distribution. We randomly divided the sample of refugee households into two groups and interviewed them at two different times,

After days of discussing with households’ heads in refugee camps and neighboring villages, we realized how central the distribution of food aid to refugees and the host community was, and especially its timing.

The idea came to us while preparing a study on self-sufficiency of refugee households in camps in the south of Chad. At the time of survey, refugees had been living in camps for up to seven years.