Do Initial Neighborhood Characteristics Impact Future Residential Integration of Refugees? Quasi-experimental Evidence from a Swedish Placement Policy

Sweden has recorded the highest number of refugees per capita in Europe in recent decades, while its major cities maintain high levels of ethnic segregation and urban unrest. This project investigates the long-term impact of refugees' initial neighborhood placement on long-term neighborhood integration.

Using full population register data since 1990, the project applies a fine-grained k-nearest-neighbor approach and accounts for refugee's potential self-selection into neighborhoods by using a Swedish refugee placement policy as exogenous treatment. Our results indicate that the higher the quality of refugees' initial neighborhood in terms of share of natives, highly educated and employed, the higher their future neighborhood quality along these dimensions. These results hold robustly and are not driven by stayers. We argue that neighborhood socialization at a small geographic scale can be an important channel in explaining the path-dependent pattern of residential integration.

Researchers

Matz Dahlberg
Sebastian Kohl
Madhinee Valeyatheepillay