the host community. As host communities’ often have negative attitudes and behavior towards refugees (Adida et al., 2018; Hangartner et al., 2019; Valli et al., 2019; Wike et al., 2016), a failure to stimulate positive change among the host community indicates that the intervention does not address their underlying concerns regarding employment and refugees.

Given that our endline survey was collected right after the completion of the training, it is perhaps not surprising that economic impacts failed to materialize. Indeed, we imagined such an outcome in our pre-analysis plan. Endline data was collected, literally, on the last day of a set of trainings that required significant time commitment from participants. That the control group, who were free to pursue and undertake employment, did not manage to do so more so than the treatment group suggests significant labor market constraints. This should temper expectations about the potential longer-term impacts of this program, which are reinforced by more recent macro-economic problems in the region. Both countries have suffered economically due to Covid, and Lebanon has had additional political and financial crises. Broadly speaking, these concerns are reflected by null findings in terms of optimism and experience / perceptions of economic scarcity in the host community.

Similarly, the program did not assist refugees in finding employment. However, in contrast to the host community, the program stimulated a range of positive attitudinal and behavioral outcomes among the refugee community. In particular, the program made refugees in the treatment group more optimistic, left them feeling more capable to meet their current needs and has resulted in a reduction of relative group bias in the dictator game. These social outcomes appear to be driven by a direct “program effect” as identified by Brück et al. (2021) as opposed to an indirect effect via employment gains. For these specific outcomes, we imagine, simply, that involvement in the program sent a positive signal to refugee participants about their future competitiveness in the labor market, which improved optimism. Ability to meet current needs might have derived from something more prosaic – the program provided small stipends to cover necessities for the training period. These small amounts may have been sufficient to help refugees but not hosts, which is why we see shifts in ability to meet current needs for refugees and not hosts.

The major differences in outcomes across the host and refugee communities suggest, not only differential effects of the program itself but also differential needs and expectations of the two communities, and how that may limit the ability of the same program to achieve similar results across both populations. The heterogeneity tests go some way to suggesting that improvements in general economic optimism and optimism about meeting basic needs (i.e., economic scarcity) are linked to wider interpersonal behaviors among the refugee community, given that the results move in the same direction. At the same time, since we control for optimism in our analyses, we note that other factors must also be contributing to behavioral change amongst the refugee community. In turn, it is also clear that, whatever these additional factors might be, they are not stimulating similar change in the host community.

While consistent with the predictions of contact theory – as most trainings took place in mixed nationality groups - and of reduced perceived competition, it is not fully clear if our findings represent a meaningful reduction in intergroup tensions. Changes among the 21