Opportunities or Benefits: Local Conditions and Refugee Labor Market Integration

Katia Torres, Andreas Steinmayr and Valentin Wett

No 26232, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: This paper studies how local labor market tightness and welfare benefit levels at the time of receiving protection shape refugees' labor market integration and location choices. We exploit a sequence of reforms that generated quasi-random variation in benefit levels, together with variation in local labor market tightness across the districts and months in which refugees receive protection. We find that tighter local labor markets raise employment, while more generous benefits slightly reduce it. These employment effects persist for about 2.5 years, but both shocks have lasting impacts on internal migration. Moreover, the negative employment effect of benefits is larger in tighter labor markets. Neither shock affects the probability of emigrating from Austria.

Keywords: Immigrant integration; refugees; welfare benefits; labor demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J31 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rfberlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/26232.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:26232

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 ().