Randomized to Opportunity: Measuring Place Effects for Refugee Children

N. Meltem Daysal, Joseph J. Doyle, Naeim Samandaril, Emil Simonsen and Mircea Trandafir

No 13049, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Area-level measures of economic opportunity are increasingly used to guide place-based policies. We study whether these measures predict long-run outcomes for a vulnerable population: over 12,000 refugee children quasi-randomly assigned to municipalities under Denmark's 1986–1998 dispersal policy. We focus on predetermined measures of opportunity available when children arrive and validate them using a mover-exposure design among permanent residents. Moving from a low- to a high-opportunity area (a two-standard-deviation increase) raises adult income rank by 3 percentile points (7.5 percent) and employment by 4 percentage points. It also reduces criminal convictions by 14 percent and teen parenthood by 19 percent, with more modest effects on educational attainment. Economic opportunity predicts crime and teen parenthood more strongly than other area characteristics, including local crime rates. For adult income, area-level inequality is a particularly strong predictor. These findings suggest that social mobility in the areas where refugee children grow up meaningfully shapes their long-term wellbeing.

Keywords: refugees; economic opportunity; inequality; intergenerational mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 J62 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp13049.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:_13049

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 ().