Humanitarian Aid and Its Consequences

How can humanitarian aid be most cost-effectively delivered? How does receiving humanitarian aid shape recipients’ beliefs about the government’s effectiveness and legitimacy, and by extension, their political participation? The research team proposes to study these questions using an RCT with vulnerable female-headed households in Pakistan. Participants will be assigned to a control group receiving no aid, or two treatment groups that receive aid through different mechanisms: the most common mechanism nowadays, cash, vs. an alternative approach that the researchers have found to have considerable potential, aid delivered through digital channels. This will shed light on which of the two delivery methods is most cost-effective, has higher usage rates, and is less likely to be diverted by non-recipients. This RCT will also allow the researchers to study how receiving aid affects recipients’ political views and participation by comparing aid recipients to those in the control group through a variety of real political behaviors, lab-in-the-field experiments, and survey approaches to deal with sensitive topics and avoid survey response bias.