Refugee Inflows and Employment Outcomes in Europe: Evidence from the 2015 Refugee Crisis

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines the labour market effects of the 2015 refugee crisis across European countries using a Difference-in-Differences framework. Drawing on Eurostat panel data for 2010-2020, the analysis compares employment rate dynamics between countries in the top and bottom quartiles of asylum seeker exposure in 2015. The main estimates yield a positive but statistically insignificant association between refugee inflows and employment rates (β₁ = 0.068, p = 0.960). However, results are sensitive to model specification: excluding macroeconomic control variables or Hungary from the treatment group both produce statistically significant results, while the alternative timing and median threshold specifications remain consistent with the main finding. The conducted assumption checks, including a placebo and an event-study specification, lead to moderate support for the identifying assumptions, although pre-existing structural differences between groups limit the causal interpretation of the study. The baseline specification is too underpowered to discriminate between competing theoretical frameworks. However, restricting the sample to countries that genuinely absorbed refugee inflows by excluding Hungary as a transit case, a significant negative employment effect emerges, suggesting that policy heterogeneity within treatment groups is a critical design consideration for cross-country refugee studies. Given the wide confidence intervals, few clusters, and limited statistical power, the results should be interpreted as suggestive associations rather than causal estimates.