Refugee Return

Joop Adema, Panu Poutvaara, Cevat Aksoy and Yvonne Giesing

No 26076, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

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)
JEL-codes: D74 F22 J15 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/26076.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:crm:wpaper:26076

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Moritz Lubczyk () and Matthew Nibloe ().