Refugee Return

Joop Age Harm Adema, Cevat Giray Aksoy, Yvonne Giesing (), Panu Poutvaara () and Yunus Aksoy

No 12550, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Despite rising refugee numbers worldwide, refugees’ return decisions remain poorly understood. Prior work examines either intentions or realized return, but not both. We fielded a ten-wave panel of Ukrainian refugees, linking prewar home municipalities to geocoded conflict and territorial control data and eliciting war expectations. Intentions strongly predict behavior: by 2025, 42% of those planning to return soon in 2022 had returned, versus 1% of those planning to settle abroad. Increasing conflict in the home municipality reduces return there but barely affects return to Ukraine overall. More pessimistic war expectations explain 21% of the decline in return intentions.

Keywords: refugees; return migration; conflict; Ukraine (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12550.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ces:ceswps:_12550

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().