The impact of Syrian refugees on natives’ labor market outcomes in Turkey: evidence from a quasi-experimental design

By Burcu Gurcihan Yunculer, Huzeyfe Torun, Semih Tumen, Evren Ceritoğlu. Social Science Research Network, 2017

246 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Civil conflict in Syria, started in March 2011, led to a massive wave of forced immigration from Northern Syria to the Southeastern regions of Turkey, which later had serious economic/political repercussions on the MENA region and most of Europe. This paper exploits this natural experiment to estimate the impact of Syrian refugees on the labor market outcomes of natives in Turkey. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that immigration has considerably affected the employment outcomes of natives, while its impact on wage outcomes has been negligible. We document notable employment losses among informal workers as a consequence of refugee inflows. Formal employment increased slightly potentially due to increased social services in the region. The majority of those who lost their informal jobs have either left the labor force or remained unemployed. Formal employment and unemployment rates have increased, while labor force participation, informal employment, and job finding rates have declined among natives. Disadvantaged groups, i.e., women, younger workers, and less-educated workers, have been affected the worst. The prevalence of informal employment in the Turkish labor markets has amplified the negative impact of Syrian refugee inflows on natives’ labor market outcomes. Overall, the impact of Syrian refugee inflows on the Turkish labor markets has been limited, which suggests that the potential costs on the European and other affected labor markets might also be limited.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e695e5ae1055f2140c337330fc949e627882487

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In General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

The Economic Impact of Syrian Refugees on Host Countries: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Turkey (2016, background): “The first column says that the refugee inflows to the treatment 2For more details, see (Ceritoglu et al. 2015), (Balkan and Tumen 2015), and (Balkan, Torun and Tumen 2015). region reduces the likelihood of having an informal job by 2.26 percentage points for natives in those regions compared to the…”
The impact of refugees on employment and wages in Jordan (2019, unknown): “Ceritoglu et al. (2017) also found negative impacts of Syrian refugee inflows on Turkish natives’ labor market outcomes: increasing unemployment and reducing labor force participation, informal employment and job finding rates among natives.”
Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets (2016, result): “As an example, a recent study of Syrian refugees in Turkey may suffer from this issue (Ceritoglu et al. 2015).”
The impact of forced displacement on host communities: A review of the empirical literature in economics (2019, background): “19 Ceritoglu et al. (2017) IZA Journal of Labor Policy 20 20 40 40”