This paper is the first to provide evidence of the causal effect of refugees on bilateral trade between host countries. Using the Syrian crisis as a case study, the analysis employs annual data on Syrian refugees and bilateral trade across nine industrial sectors. By estimating a structural gravity model and employing a novel two-stage structural approach, I find that a 10% increase in the refugee population between trading partners leads to an average 0.3% rise in bilateral trade among host countries. Furthermore, I find that this effect is primarily driven by post-2011 migrants rather than the pre-existing Syrian diaspora, and by network effects rather than one-sided export or import channels. The effect is particularly pronounced in the textile sector, which experienced an estimated 0.7% increase. These findings remain robust across alternative data sources, sample restrictions, and extensive sensitivity analyses.

We study a 2016 policy that prohibited refugees in Germany from moving across federal states for three years after receiving asylum. The restriction sharply reduced refugees' cross-state mobility rates from 25% to 3%. We estimate the causal effects of the restriction using a difference-in-differences design comparing refugees who received asylum before and after the policy across states with high and low pre-policy outmobility rates. Labor market outcomes are largely unaffected, with positive earnings and employment effects among refugees assigned to the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The mobility restriction reduced the share of refugees living in dense urban areas with high foreign shared. However, restricted refugees substituted toward the largest, densest, and most diverse cities within their initially assigned states.

This paper examines the impact of forced immigrants on the subjective well-being of the natural-born population in Germany. The empirical analysis covers a period from 2014 to 2019 and integrates various sources of administrative data on asylum seekers at the district level with individual-level survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). The empirical strategy follows an instrumental variable (IV) approach using two different instruments.

On December 8, 2024, the sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime abruptly changed Syria's political landscape and reshaped the return prospects for millions of Syrians living abroad. We exploit this unanticipated regime change as a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of homeland developments on refugees' settlement and return intentions. Drawing on novel survey data from Germany, launched just days before Assad's fall, we find that the regime collapse significantly affected the expressed settlement intentions of Syrians in Germany. However, we find no effect on concrete short-term emigration plans, suggesting that increased return aspirations reflect forward-looking intentions rather than immediate behavioral change.