Sarah Winton (PhD London School of Economics 2026) has been awarded Standard Error’s third Best Paper Prize for her paper “Refugees’ Right to Work: Efficiency and Equity in Host Country Labor Markets” at the 7th Workshop on the Economics and Politics of Migration at Rome’s Sapienza University.  

Winton, a postdoctoral fellow at Dartmouth who will join Stockholm University as assistant professor of economics in 2027, studies development, labor markets, and urban and spatial economies in the Middle East and North Africa. Her prizewinning paper measures the local labor market impacts of a policy granting Syrian refugees work authorization in Jordan. 

The Workshop on the Economics and Politics of Migration is organized annually by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), EBRD, King’s College London, and a local host—this year the Department of Economics at Sapienza University. The organizers select 12 of the most innovative new studies of migration and forced displacement each year for intensive peer workshopping and discussion. Standard Error Research Editors has selected and presented the workshop’s Best Paper Prize since 2025. 

Winton’s prizewinning contribution 

Winton’s research joins a sprawling literature on what happens to local workers’ wages and employment when large numbers of migrants enter host labor markets. While most of this research considers the impacts of such labor market shocks in rich countries, Winton looks at a developing country in the Middle East: Jordan, 11% of whose population comprises Syrian refugees. 

Some three-quarters of the world’s refugees and displaced people are hosted in developing economies like Jordan. A distinctive feature of such settings is that if refugees are legally barred from formal labor markets, they often instead turn to the countries’ large informal economies for subsistence. This can exacerbate many structural inefficiencies in how resources are allocated across the economy. 

Winton finds that the Jordan Compact of February 2016, a policy committing Jordan to issuing 200,000 refugee work permits, succeeded in bringing many Syrian refugees out of unemployment and informal occupations and into the formal labor force. It also narrowed the wage gap between similar local and refugee workers from 31.2 to 10.5 percentage points. She then builds an innovative model of the whole economy to estimate the policy’s effects on wages and employment overall and for refugees and locals separately and identify what drove the impacts. 

With her model, Winton estimates that the policy grew output overall by 10.9%, with Jordanians’ average wages rising by nearly 1% and Syrians’ by 20%. The aggregate effects reflect both the impact of the injection of labor into the formal market and re-sorting of workers across occupations in response: When refugees entered formal low-skilled jobs, firms grew and demanded more higher-skilled workers, allowing higher-skilled locals to move into better-paying occupations. Wages in those lower-skilled occupations rose, as well, as labor in the occupation switchers’ industries became scarcer and the affected firms became more productive.

Winton argues that the policy helped correct a misallocation of workers’ labor and skills across the Jordanian labor market. The mechanisms that she uncovers can help account for the aggregate productivity gains driving macroeconomic growth that economists have long observed to follow immigration shocks.

About the Standard Error Best Paper Prize

Winners of the Standard Error Best Paper Prize receive a round of expert editing and consulting on a work in progress of their choice. The company awarded its inaugural Best Paper Prize last year to Artur Obminski (PhD Paris School of Economics 2026) for his research making cutting-edge use of Google Maps Reviews data to show that locals select into (and out of) face-to-face contact with immigrants. Obminski was later recognized with the Young Economist Best Presentation Award at the CEPR/University of Bologna Economics Job Market Bootcamp. 

Standard Error’s second Best Paper Prize went to Ashish K. Sedai of the University of Texas at Arlington and a distinguished group of coauthors from the Asian Development Bank Institute in Tokyo and the Indian Statistical Institute at Kolkata for their outstanding research on an intervention to support spouses’ cooperation and adolescents’ psychosocial health in India.

Standard Error is a mission-driven company that seeks to help early career scholars and researchers from underrepresented groups overcome barriers to academic publishing. It works with academic departments as well as individual researchers on six continents to support them in the manuscript development and peer review process. The Best Paper Prize aims to bring innovative, policy-relevant scholarship by early career researchers to broader academic and public attention.