Creating labour mobility opportunities, allowing refugees to move legally from first asylum countries to receiving countries based on their skills/qualifications and recipient labour market needs, have the potential to provide beneficiaries with access to a livelihood, ease migratory pressures...

We study the impact of the 2015 mass arrival of refugees to Germany on residential housing rents. Using unique data on end of year county-level refugee populations and data on monthly offers of flats for rent from Germany’s leading online property broker Immobilienscout24, we find strong...

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...

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...

This paper exploits the sudden mass arrival of refugees to Germany in 2015 to study potential price penalties suffered by residential property in vicinity of refugee reception centers (RRCs). Using novel data on exact locations of publicly-run RRCs in 2014 and 2015 and monthly offers of...

A commonly expressed concern about immigration is that it undermines social cohesion in the receiving country. In this paper, we study the impact of a large and sudden inflow of asylum seekers on several indicators of social cohesion. In 2015/16, over one million asylum seekers from Syria,...