Pierre-Louis Vézina will be presenting the paper "Refugees and Foreign Direct Investment: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from US Resettlements" co-authored with Anna-Maria Mayda, Christopher Parsons and Han Pham. 

The authors exploit the designs of two separate US refugee dispersal policies before and after the enactment of the Refugee Act 1980 to provide causal evidence that refugees foster outward FDI to their countries and regions of origin. Drawing upon aggregated individual-level refugee and project-level FDI data, the authors show this effect holds along the extensive and intensive margins, in terms of both capital and job creation. Focusing on the specific case of Vietnam, they provide evidence that national domestic reforms amplified the positive FDI-creating effects of the overseas Vietnamese diaspora. Overall, their results highlight a new mechanism through which refugees foster development at their origins.
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