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Forced displacement has disrupted Syrian refugees’ lives and exposed them to new communities and norms. This paper assesses how gender norms shape the lives of Syrian refugee adolescent girls in Jordan, using nationally representative data. We use factor analysis to summarise a variety of beliefs and behavioural aspects of norms: gender role attitudes, justification of domestic violence, decision-making, and mobility. We compare these outcomes by sex, nationality, and for adolescents versus adults. We complement our data on individual beliefs and behaviours with family and community beliefs and behaviours as proxies for others’ expectations and behaviours. We then examine how own, family, and community gender norms relate to two key adolescent outcomes: domestic work and enrolment in school. We find that while gender role attitudes are similar across generations and nationalities, Syrian adolescent girls are particularly restricted in their mobility. Nonetheless, they have similar educational outcomes as boys and, after accounting for differences in socioeconomic status, as Jordanian girls. While gender inequality in domestic work is substantial, higher levels of own and mother’s decision-making predict lower domestic workloads, illustrating the linkages between different dimensions of gender norms and economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Countries around the world are working to develop social protection floors to help reduce poverty. Ensuring workers can earn adequate wages is an important component of social protection floors. In this paper, we explore who receives minimum, poverty, median, and living wages in Jordan, comparing 2010 and 2016, and in Tunisia in 2014. We demonstrate that while the majority of workers do earn at least minimum and poverty wages, only a minority of workers earn a living wage. The chances of earning minimum, poverty, median, and living wages depend on the characteristics of workplaces, specific work characteristics (especially job formality and skills required), and the demographic characteristics of workers. While results are consistent with wages reflecting, in part, workers' productivity, they may also reflect rents, efficiency wages, and for minimum wages issues with enforceability and policy design. These findings highlight which workers are vulnerable to low earnings and where greater enforcement or redesign of minimum wage legislation might be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The children affected by the Syrian conflict, including the large population of Syrian refugee children hosted in neighboring countries, are at risk of becoming a 'lost generation' due to interruptions in their schooling. This paper examines how educational outcomes of Syrian refugees in Jordan have evolved from pre-conflict to during conflict and displacement. We rely on nationally representative survey data from Jordan in 2016 and in-depth interviews with Syrian refugee youth. We use discrete-time hazard models and compare dropout pre-conflict, during the conflict, and during displacement for different stages of schooling. Syrian refugees in Jordan faced disrupted schooling in Syria due to the conflict, followed by several multidimensional supply- and demand-side barriers to education in Jordan. Yet ultimately enrollment rates, at least through 2016, have recovered to pre-conflict levels for basic education among the group of Syrians in Jordan, with important lessons for other countries struggling to protect refugee children's education. Host countries' policy response to refugee education plays a critical role in whether and for how long refugee children resume schooling after displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marriage is a central stage in the transition to adulthood in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This article investigates the effect of marriage on women's employment in MENA, examining how different types of work are affected by relatively early marriage, defined as marriage by the median age of marriage. An important contribution of this study is to examine the two main mechanisms by which marriage can affect work: (1) its effect on ever entering work and (2) its effect on exiting work. This study endogenizes the marriage decision using an instrumental variables approach. It finds that marriage by the median age reduces women's probability of market work by 47 percent in Jordan, 30 percent in Tunisia, and 16 percent in Egypt. Much of the effect is due to a reduction in the probability of private wage work, which women tend to leave at marriage. HIGHLIGHTS Women in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia often leave employment at marriage. Marrying by the median age has varying effects on different types of employment. Women are particularly likely to leave private sector wage work at marriage. Changes are needed to reconcile private wage employment with women's domestic roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition to adulthood around the world is increasingly characterized by young people's desire to form independent households. Forming such households in Egypt requires buying or building a dwelling or obtaining a rental unit. Policies governing housing markets, such as rent control, and limited financing options have historically made access to housing for young couples challenging. In this paper, we use a difference-in-difference approach to evaluate how the liberalization of rental markets in Egypt affected the timing of marriage. We find that Egypt's 1996 rental reforms accelerated marriages and led to a reversal in the trend of rising age at marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egypt and Tunisia are perceived to have high levels of inequality, yet based on standard measures, inequality in these two countries is not unusually high. In this study we explore a different dimension of inequality in Egypt and Tunisia by using a more complete measure of income and decomposing inequality by income sources (factor components). We find that higher-income households have more income sources than lower-income ones. Informal wage work and earnings from household enterprises are more common in Egypt than Tunisia, while formal wage work, pensions, and social assistance are more common in Tunisia. Social assistance does little to offset income inequality in either country. Enterprise earnings (in Egypt) and agricultural earnings (in Tunisia) as well as rent and other capital income in both countries play a large role in inequality. High inequality in these non-wage income sources and unequal access to income sources tied to wealth and capital may help explain why inequality is perceived to be high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth in Egypt hold rising aspirations for their adult lives, yet face an increasingly uncertain and protracted transition from school to work and thus into adulthood. This paper investigates how labor market insertion has been evolving over time in Egypt and how the nature of youth transitions relates to gender and social class. The study examines 19,925 respondents from the 2012 wave of the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey. We demonstrate that recent youth cohorts face poorer chances of transitioning into a good job than previous cohorts, despite large increases in educational attainment. Social class is playing an increasing role in determining the success of the transition from school to work in Egypt. Whether youth successfully make transitions to formal jobs, embark on such transitions and fail, or pursue more traditional careers in informal employment or family businesses or farms depends on a complex and changing interaction between their own educational attainment and the resources of their families. In light of these findings, we discuss the policies that can help facilitate more successful transitions for struggling youth in Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Middle East and North Africa region has the world's lowest returns to education. This paper examines what the value of a degree is using nationally representative labour market surveys from Egypt (2012), Jordan (2010) and Tunisia (2014). Specifically, the authors estimate Mincer models for levels and years of schooling. They find that returns are highest in Tunisia and lowest in Egypt, although all three countries fall short of the global average. Higher education is where returns are greatest. They also analyse the returns by sub-groups: sex; age group; and sector. The returns are higher for women than men in Egypt. The younger generation has lower returns than the older generation in Egypt. The private sector in Egypt and Tunisia has lower returns than the public sector. One reason for the low returns is that many individuals are overeducated relative to position requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating jobs, especially good jobs, is one of the greatest challenges facing Egypt. This paper investigates the nature of job growth in Egypt, including the firm, industry, and worker characteristics that are related to job growth. Using data from Egypt's establishment censuses linked to various firm and labor surveys, we examine job growth in private sector establishments over 1996–2017. We find that job growth has primarily followed a labor absorption paradigm, with job growth unrelated to productivity and highest for firms with more informal employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measures of consumption and poverty are critical metrics of the wellbeing of individuals, their households, communities, and countries. Collecting data on consumption and poverty is challenging and costly, and therefore these measures are only infrequently available in survey data. In this paper, we demonstrate how information commonly available in household surveys can be used to impute consumption, even recovering the original variance, which is crucial for assessments of poverty and inequality. Our application adds consumption estimates to the publicly available Labor Market Panel Surveys for Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia, which can act as a valuable resource for researchers interested in the intersection of inequality, poverty, and a host of labor market behaviors in the Middle East and North Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests the assumption that formal education is the best route to job skills. The returns to formal vocational secondary schooling are compared to the returns to acquiring skills outside the education system, such as undertaking an apprenticeship, for male wage workers in Egypt. A unique longitudinal dataset with information on schooling and skills allows for causal inference about returns by comparing siblings. For recent cohorts, the estimated returns to formal vocational secondary education are the same as attaining no formal education. However, the returns to skills obtained outside of formal education are substantial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instability in child care arrangements can negatively affect children's development, especially in low-income families. However, few studies have examined what predicts changes over time in child care arrangements. This paper presents findings from a unique multiyear study tracking child care use in low-income families. We estimate rich quantitative models to analyze the relationships among child, household, and care provider characteristics and four different types of changes. We find turnover in child care arrangements to be common in this low-income population. Over a period of six months, half of the children changed primary provider. Child care changes were frequently related to job loss, changes in family composition, or the changing availability of caregivers. While concerns have been raised that short spells of child care subsidy receipt cause child care instability, we found that subsidy use was not associated with higher rates of change. In addition, we found that the lower a parent's assessment of the child's experience in a particular arrangement in the prior time period, the higher the likelihood of changing providers by the next survey wave. These results indicate that low-income parents recognize quality factors and change arrangements to improve the quality of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]