Immigrants’ Location Preferences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

Abstract

This paper exploits a dispersal policy for refugee immigrants to estimate the importance of local and regional factors for refugees’ location preferences. The main results of a mixed proportional hazard competing risks model are that placed refugees react to high regional unemployment and lack of a local immigrant population by migrating to large municipalities. Lack of local fellow countrymen, however, increases the exit rate to medium-sized as well as large municipalities. This finding is likely to be a result of the dispersal policy. Finally, refugees react strongly to assignment to small municipalities by migrating mainly to medium-sized municipalities.Location Preferences; Internal Migration; Immigrants; Dispersal Policies; Duration Analysis