Pomona College Economics professor Tahir Andrabi is garnering national attention for his research on disaster relief aid in Pakistan, which supports an optimistic view of how aid affects the attitudes of its recipients toward foreigners.

Andrabi spent much of last year collecting data and interviewing families in northeastern Pakistan, where a massive earthquake caused widespread devastation in 2005. Andrabi and his co-author, World Bank economist Jishnu Das, found that the people living closest to the fault line, who received the highest level of international aid, were the most likely to trust foreigners and believe that people of different ethnicities could solve problems together.

“Their belief in people working together, and [being] able to help each other—they all shoot up,” Andrabi said of the Pakistani aid recipients. “People matter,” he added. “It’s not so much the dollars given, but people who go, and people who help out this kind of global civil society—NGOs, aid communities. All of those things, I think, really made a very big difference.”

Now, Andrabi and Das’s findings are being widely discussed by policymakers and journalists eager for insight into how to handle natural disasters such as this year’s catastrophic floods in Pakistan. News organizations such as the Associated Press and USA Today have covered the study, and Andrabi recently spoke about his findings to U.S. State Department and Agency for International Development staff members in Washington, D.C.

Andrabi has also presented his research at Pomona and Claremont McKenna Colleges, where he was invited to speak about foreign aid at an economics seminar.

After the earthquake in October 2005, Andrabi and Das took a short trip to the disaster area and helped set up a website to collect information on which areas had received aid and which still needed it. Their experience with aid workers on that trip would inspire their research four years later.

“It was there that we realized there were so many people who were coming to help over there, and it was really a remarkable group,” he said. “It was from all different countries. A lot of medical personnel, health workers, a lot of rescue and relief specialists, helicopter pilots, truck drivers, people who were driving cranes and things.”

The impact of aid is difficult to study because it can be hard to determine which individuals received aid, and resources are not distributed randomly.

“People who receive aid many times are systematically different from people who do not receive aid,” Andrabi said. These differences, he added, can cause a statistical problem (selection bias) that makes the results difficult to interpret.

“There are not too many good studies of the impact of aid, and most of them have suffered from this problem,” he said.

The 2005 earthquake, Andrabi said, presented an unusual opportunity to study foreign aid while avoiding the usual statistical pitfalls. Andrabi and Das were able to talk directly with the inhabitants of the region to determine who received aid, and their research suggests that there was not severe selection bias.

“The fault line that was activated was really a random fault line,” Andrabi said. “What we first show in our research is that population patterns along that fault line are not systematic.”

Since people living along the fault line were similar in most respects to those living far away, except for the fact that they received more aid, Andrabi believes that their more positive attitudes toward foreigners reflect the impact of aid.

“There is this feeling of what is called aid pessimism, that aid doesn’t work,” he said. “My sense is that this is very nice, statistically clean evidence that it worked in an area that was very difficult, where you’d think it might not work.”

Sam Haltenhof PO ’11, Alec Larson PO ’11, Hammad Sheikh PO ’10, and Wynn Sullivan PO ’10 worked on Andrabi’s study as research assistants. All four are thanked individually in Andrabi and Das’s working paper, which is circulating as they prepare to publish their final paper.

“I learned a lot about the research process in general,” Larson wrote in an e-mail to The Student Life. “Way more work goes into getting a data set ready for regressions than I thought. I would think I had a data set ready and Andrabi would ask me to run more checks on my merges as well as check by using another data source to see which source was more reliable, especially considering what we were looking for with our regressions.”

Haltenhof wrote in another e-mail, “Our tasks were as routine as reassigning male/female responses or as labyrinthine as constructing village-level school information from three different survey data sets. As Professor Andrabi put it, we were responsible for knowing the data set better than he did and being able to shape the data any way he chose.

“Working hands-on with such a large data set and writing a paper with such huge implications also gave me a sense of gratification when I saw the completed project,” he added.

Andrabi is planning to bring representatives from aid organizations to Pomona for an 0ct. 30 presentation at Rose Hills Theater, but the details of the event are still in the works.