Barriers to Language Acquisition and Labor Market Integration of Refugees

The project aims to:
1) Identify barriers to host-country language acquisition among refugees.
2) Identify key determinants of the historically high refugee employment levels.

First, we designed an information treatment to estimate the role of beliefs about labor market returns in the decision to invest in language skills. With additional information from the Danish Refugee Cohort (DARECO) on time constraints, uncertainty, and capacity for learning a new language as well as a follow-up on initial beliefs, we will be able to provide novel behavioral, causal estimates on language investments and study heterogeneous effects at relatively low costs.

Second, we will expand the classical models of immigrant assimilation to study how the composition and size of refugee arrival cohorts, labor demand conditions, and national policies affect the employment levels and language training participation of refugees in Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Our unified, cross-country approach enables a better identification of the key determinants of successful labor market integration, including the role of national policies.

Project start

2026

Funding

Rockwool Foundation

Researchers

Mette Foged, Researcher, ROCKWOOL Foundation (Project Leader)
Jacob Nielsen Arendt, Professor of Economics, ROCKWOOL Foundation
Giovanni Peri, Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis
Edith Zink, Postdoctoral Researcher in Economics, University of Copenhagen
Sébastien Willis, Researcher in Economics, Institute for Housing and Urban Research (IBF)
Bernt Bratsberg, Researcher, Frisch Centre
Oddbjørn Raaum, Researcher, Frisch Centre