Abstract:
II study the effect of refugees' protection status on labor market outcomes focusing on a recent cohort of Syrian and Iraqi refugees entering Germany between 2013 and 2016. My empirical analysis exploits a sudden and unpredictable change in the assessment of the Federal Agency responsible for asylum claims to grant full refugee status in accordance with the Geneva convention to refugees from these two countries in March 2016. Using data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey of refugees and exploiting the policy change in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, estimation results indicate a substantial negative effect of subsidiary protection status on earnings and employment.