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Housing Support Policies and Refugees' Labor Market Integration in Austria

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  • Fanny Dellinger

Abstract

Housing support is an important lever for promoting integration objectives with huge potential to improve refugees' early employment outcomes. This mixed-methods study is based on Austrian register data and interviews with NGO and government representatives. In Austria, asylum seekers are quasi-randomly assigned to federal states (Bundesländer). There, monetary assistance is similar for asylees but only some states offer further support with the housing search process. This study assesses the impact of housing support on refugees' location choice and early employment outcomes by comparing two groups of refugee men: singles and those with families. If housing support is limited, scarce resources are directed to the most vulnerable and single men are often left out. This makes them more likely to leave an assigned state and find shelter with the ethnic community. Whereas in states with strong housing support single men and families show roughly equal propensities to out-migrate, if support is low 63% of single men but only 35% of families leave. In the first year, employment rates of single men assigned to low housing support states are estimated to be 6 percentage points lower due to a lack of housing support.

Suggested Citation

  • Fanny Dellinger, 2021. "Housing Support Policies and Refugees' Labor Market Integration in Austria," Working Papers 2021-32, Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck.
    • Handle: RePEc:inn:wpaper:2021-32
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Labor Market Integration of Refugees; Housing entry pathways; host country institutions; Austria;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • J68 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Public Policy
    • I38 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
    • H73 - Public Economics - - State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations - - - Interjurisdictional Differentials and Their Effects

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