There are concerns about the attachment of immigrants to the labor force, and the potential policy responses. This paper uses a bi-national survey on immigrant performance to investigate the sorting of individuals into full-time paid-employment and entrepreneurship and their economic success....

Armed conflicts, natural disasters and infrastructure projects continue to force millions into migration. This is especially true for developing countries. After World War II, about 8 million ethnic Germans experienced a similar situation when forced to leave their homelands and settle within...

This paper studies the effects of threat on convergence to local culture and on economic assimilation of refugees, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in their allocation across German regions between 2013 and 2016. We combine novel survey data on cultural preferences and economic outcomes...

Upon arrival to a new country, many immigrants face job downgrading, a phenomenon describing workers being in jobs far below where they would be assigned based on their skills. Downgrading leads to immigrants receiving lower returns to the same skills than natives. The level of downgrading could...

This paper investigates the effects of local exposure to refugees on electoral outcomes in the 2016 state election in Germany. Based on quasi-random variation in the allocation of refugees across municipalities and unique data on refugee populations and their type of accommodation, I find that...

Millions of refugees made their way to Europe between 2014 and 2015, with over one million arriving in Germany alone. Yet, little is known about the impact of this inflow on labor markets, crime, and voting behavior. This article uses administrative data on refugee allocation and provides an...

In the 2015 refugee crisis, nearly one million refugees came to Germany, raising concern that crimes against natives would rise. Using novel county-level data, we study this question empirically in first-difference and 2SLS regressions. Our results do not support the view that Germans were...

Following one of the largest displacements in human history, almost eight million forced migrants arrived in West Germany after WWII. We study empirically how the settlement location of migrants affected their economic, social and political integration in West Germany. We first document large...

Using novel registry data on the population of asylum seekers in Germany for the period from 2010 to 2016, and quasi-experimental variation induced by German allocation policies, we identify causal effects of the size and composition of local co-national networks on formal labor market access of...

This paper studies the persistence of a large, unexpected, and regionally very unevenly distributed population shock, the inflow of eight million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II. Using detailed census data from 1939 to 1970, we show that the shock had a...