Salemi, Colette2022-08-292022-08-292022-05https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241311University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 2022. Major: Applied Economics. Advisors: Marc Bellemare, Justin Johnson. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 282 pages.There are over 20 million refugees in the world today, and a large share of these refugees are required to live in camps. Refugee camps are often associated with negative environmental, economic, or welfare outcomes in the areas close to them. But these priors are often unsubstantiated. In this dissertation, I use remotely sensed data, household microdata, and causal inference techniques (difference-in-difference models) to estimate the impact of camps on forest cover and host community nutrition. Chapters 1 and 3 examine forest cover in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Chapter 1 suggests that in land-abundant SSA, camps do not have an economically significant impact on forest cover. Chapter 3 finds that forest losses may be occurring as host community members expand their settlement footprint near camps. The results challenge pre-existing notions of refugee camp populations and their impact on forests. Chapter 2 turns its attention towards host community outcomes and examines how camp openings in SSA impact child and adult nutrition. The results suggest that children living 0-10 km from camps experience a reduction in their weight-for-age and height-for-age. I speculate that this result is mediated by localized price shocks, especially for foods not included in in-kind aid packages (ex: cereals).enThesis or Dissertation