Immigrants’ Location Preferences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment

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