Impact of Refugees on Immigrants’ Labor Market Outcomes

Bilal Malaeb and Jackline Wahba

No 1194, Working Papers from Economic Research Forum

Abstract: The Syrian refugee influx in Jordan came on top of an additional 1.6 million foreigners residing in Jordan. The non-national population of refugees and immigrants had increased Jordan’s population of 6.6 million by about 45%. This raises an important question on whether the inflow of refugees has displaced immigrants in the Jordanian labor market. In this paper, we use novel data from Jordan from before and after the Syrian refugee influx to test whether economic immigrants were affected by Syrian refugees. We address several threats to identifications: the selectivity of immigrants and the geographic sorting of immigrants and refugees within Jordan using instrumental variable approach. We find that, as a result of the Syrian refugee influx, immigrants were more likely to work in the informal sector, and they worked fewer hours and had lower total wages as a result. The results suggest that the main competition that occurred in the Jordanian labor market was not between refugees and natives, but rather between refugees and economic migrants.

Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2018-05-10, Revised 2018-05-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ara, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Published by The Economic Research Forum (ERF)

Downloads: (external link)
http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1194_Final1.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1194_Final1.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://erf.org.eg/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/1194_Final1.pdf)
https://bit.ly/2SHKetn (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erg:wpaper:1194

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Economic Research Forum Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Namees Nabeel ().