Human Capital, Asylum Process Duration and the Employment Outcomes of Refugees in Austria

We present evidence on the employment outcomes among refugees who obtained legal access to the Austrian labour market between 2001 and 2017. The analyses are based on comprehensive administrative data sets from Austrian social security registers matched to process-based data from the Public Employment Service. We focus on prime-working age refugees from 31 origin countries. Our presentation will elaborate on three factors related to differential employment outcomes: The role of the education attained in the source country, the role of source country characteristics, and the length of the asylum proceedings. We find that higher levels of education are not associated with better employment outcomes. Instead, we find higher educated male refugees to be less successful on the Austrian labour market compared to their counterparts with compulsory education. This pattern of findings holds across different source countries. Moreover, there is some evidence that female refugees from countries with a low rate of female labour force participation (proxy for gender culture) are less likely to enter the host labour market. We also find that the length of the asylum proceedings is positively related to employment outcomes following legal labour market access. Related employment gaps, which are robust to various specifications and outcome measures, are larger among men than among women.

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