Housing support policies and refugees' labor market integration in Austria

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: Working Papers in Economics and Statistics ; No. 2021-32

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers ; Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies: Public Policy ; Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs ; State and Local Government; Intergovernmental Relations: Interjurisdictional Differentials and Their Effects
• Subject: Labour Market Integration of Refugees ; Housing entry pathways ; host country institutions ; Austria

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Dellinger, Fanny
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Innsbruck, Research Platform Empirical and Experimental Economics (eeecon)
• (where): Innsbruck
• (when): 2021

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/250154
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:42 AM CET