In this paper, we link the peril of asylum seekers’ migratory journey to economically quantifiable outcomes in the destination country using refugee survey data from Germany collected in the aftermath of the 2015 refugee crisis. We start by showing that, accounting for selection effects, physical victimisation during the journey to Germany is strongly associated with significantly lower mental well-being and general health upon arrival in the destination. The physical victimisation experience severely distorts the human capital investment decision by leading affected refugees to favour joining the labour force and engaging in part-time and marginal employment over pursuing host-country education. We place our findings into both the psychiatric and experimental economic literature, which suggest that experiencing physical trauma in vulnerable situations results in a "loss of future directedness" or "impatience" among the victimised, leading them to discount future payoffs more heavily
