The Impact of Refugee Crises on Host Labor Markets: The Case of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Turkey

By Y. E. Akgunduz, Marcel van den Berg, W. Hassink. Social Science Research Network, 2015

120 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The civil war in Syria has culminated into major refugee crises in its neighboring countries. By the end of 2013 more than half a million people were seeking shelter in cities and refugee camps in Turkey. We analyze how the Syrian refugee influx in Turkey has affected food and housing prices, employment rates and internal migration patterns in regions of Turkey where refugees are being accommodated. Refugee camps are geographically concentrated near the Syrian border, which enables us to employ the rest of regional Turkey as control group with a difference-in-difference approach to analyze the impact on local economies. Our findings suggest that housing and to a lesser degree food prices increased, but employment rates of natives in various skill groups are largely unaffected. Incumbent natives appear to be staying put considering the limited migration out of the region, but there is a significant decline in internal migration into regions hosting refugees. Nevertheless, the decline in internal in-migration is less than a tenth of the refugee influx, implying that there is little evidence of refugees crowding out natives in local labor markets.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b45d9540a122323f16cbe6e19b63881d5e7e43e3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

The impact of Syrian refugees on natives’ labor market outcomes in Turkey: evidence from a quasi-experimental design (2017, methodology): “Akgunduz et al. (2015) find that employment outcomes of the natives are not affected from refugee flows, while we find that refugees negatively affect the job prospects of informal native workers.”
The impact of forced displacement on host communities: A review of the empirical literature in economics (2019, background): “Akgündüz et al. (2015) study the influx of Syrian refugees in SouthEast Turkey and find a non-significant effect on employment whether employment is broken down by region, province or skill level.”
Immigration and prices: quasi-experimental evidence from Syrian refugees in Turkey (2016, unknown): “In a more recent paper, Akgunduz et al. (2015) aim to estimate the effect of Syrian refugee inflows on various outcomes—including labor market outcomes, food prices, and housing rents—in Turkey.”