The impact of refugees on socioeconomic outcomes in destination countries, including crime, can be significant. This column finds that the increase in the refugee population in Turkey led to an increase in the incidence of crime of between 2% and 4.75% per year, correspondsing to about 75,000-150,000 additional crimes per year. These results highlight the need to strengthen the social safety systems, take actions to counter the impact on the labour market, and provide support to the criminal justice system to mitigate the repercussions of massive refugee inflows.

Committees are often tasked with key decision making, yet a committee is not a singular unit but a group of individuals. This column provides a framework to assess the effect of making public individual votes in committees where members differ in competence and bias, and are concerned about external perceptions of their competence. While public voting attenuates the potential biases of competent members, secret voting attenuates the potential biases of incompetent members.

Over the last two decades, the mental health of adolescents and young adults in many countries has worsened considerably. This column looks at the role that social media has played in this, focusing on Facebook. Using the gradual expansion of the website across US colleges as a natural experiment, the authors find that students were more likely to report that mental health issues negatively affected their academic performance after Facebook was introduced at their college, with evidence suggesting that the effects operated through unfavourable social comparison.

A key question for any inflation-targeting framework is what the inflation target should be. This column reports findings from a survey of leading economists from around the world on the inflation target and related monetary policy issues. Overall, there was a strong preference for the status quo, with participants seeming to perceive high costs in terms of credibility from changing the current inflation target. However, participants concerned about the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate were more likely to favour raising the target.