the sample to individual's ages 15-64 in every survey round, and the final number of individualround observations becomes 33,858.<sup>20</sup>

# **3.2. Data on Refugees**

Data on refugees in Ethiopia come from the UNHCR. The data contain the location (GPS coordinates) of each of the refugee camps or settlement sites in the country and yearly time series data on the refugee population hosted in each of these locations from 2008 to 2018.<sup>21</sup> The refugee population is the end-of-year measure reflecting the number of refugees recorded in December<sup>22</sup> of the corresponding year, except for 2018 it reflects the number of refugees recorded in August. Moreover, the data include yearly time-series information on the aggregate number of refugees hosted in Ethiopia by country of origin.

I present some of the descriptive statistics (Figures 1 and 2) using all the available data. However, the main empirical analyses make use of the refugee data for the period 2009-2014, when the number of refugees in the country increased from 125,910 in 2009 to 660,987 in 2014. About 98% of these refugees are hosted in 23 refugee camps and 11 semi-formal settlement sites, including transit centers and entry points, and informal settlement sites with fairly precisely known locations in five of the 11 administrative regions of the country—Afar, Benishangul Gumuz, Gambella, Somali, and Tigray—where approximately 15% of the county’s population resides. The rest are spontaneously settled refugees located mainly in Addis Ababa, and small others in the Tigray region and Borena zone in the Oromia region.<sup>23</sup> Most of these spontaneously settled refugees in Addis Ababa and Tigray regions are either urban assisted refugees or those under the OCP, while those in the Oromia region are refugees living in semi-formal and informal settlements.

> 20About 24% (19%) of the sample household/individual-round observations reside in EAs that are within a 70-kilometer (50-km) buffer from the closest refugee settlement sites. How does this compare with related studies? For instance, the smallest distance between the markets (for the price analyses) and the corresponding closest refugee camps in the Alix-Garcia and Saah (2009) is 70 kilometers. Moreover, only 6% of their sample households (for the welfare analyses) reside within a 100-kilometer buffer from the closest refugee camps. On the other hand, I also show that the main findings are robust to restricting the sample to the aforementioned (70- and 50-kilometer) buffers in section 7.5.

> 21As discussed, the ESS data has information on the location (GPS coordinates) of each of the sample EAs, permitting linking the refugee data from UNHCR to the ESS EAs and thereby constructing refugee intensity for each round-EA.

> 22Due to incompleteness of the records in December 2008 and December 2009, I have the records in the following month (January) for each of these cases.

> 23I do not have the locations of these three semi-formal and informal settlements, since refugees are settled spontaneously over a large geographical area. I assigned locations as follows. For Addis Ababa, I use the location of the center of the city. In Tigray, most of the refugees are urban refugees under the OCP. I use the location of the center of Mekelle city, the largest and capital city of the Tigray region. Most of the refugees in the Borena zone of the Oromia region are Kenyan Borenas settled in the Megado settlement site located close to the Ethiopian-Kenyan border. As a result, I use the location of this settlement site for Kenyan Borena refugees.

13