Refugee Immigration and Changes in Swedish Local Labor Markets: 2005-2013 : Municipal Characteristics and Spatial Dependencies

This thesis uses panel data for the years 2005-2013 for 290 Swedish municipalities toinvestigate the impact of refugee immigration on unemployment levels with a specificfocus on local market characteristics and spatial dependencies between local labormarkets. The topic under investigation is the refugee inflow’s effect over theunemployment rates of different groups of labor market participants. The results of this study suggest that refugee inflow has significant but trivial effecton the unemployment rates of all groups- the refugee inflow modestly increases theirunemployment rates. Variable of average household income is associated with lowerunemployment rate, while the unemployment rates rise as the average age anddemographic dependency ratio variables increase. The significances of these variablesare similar among the groups of labor market participants, but magnitude are higher tothe refugees, indicating that their labor market outcome is more sensitive to thechanges in these variables. Lastly, positive spatial dependencies were found in theSwedish municipalities labor market unemployment rate