Receiving Refugees in Schools: Effects on Human Capital Accumulation, Schools and Segregation

The rapid influx of refugee children in Swedish schools during the 2015 refugee crisis posed a great challenge to receiving communities and schools by putting pressure on school resources, teaching capacity and classrooms.

Understanding the effects of accommodating refugee children on the human capital accumulation of incumbent and refugee pupils, teaching resources and school segregation in host communities, and providing evidence on effectiveness of policy measures are central to further developing successful school, migration and integration policies.

The purpose of this project is thus twofold, and focuses on the following research questions:The causal effects of receiving large numbers of refugee students.Municipal and school variation in exposure to the influx of new pupils in 2015 is exploited to analyze the causal effects of refugee accommodation in schools on 1) incumbent and refugee students by gender and socioeconomic background, 2) school resources 3) teachers, and 4) local school markets.

We study school results, school and teaching resources, teacher and student mobility, equity and segregation.The effectiveness of policy measures targeted towards immigrant students.a) An evaluation of the effects of the targeted support program to municipalities launched by the National Agency for Education (NAE) in 2016, which aimed to facilitate refugee reception of and improve the quality of education for recently arrived children and Swedish learners.

The evaluation focuses on the same set of outcomes 1)-4) mentioned above and exploits the randomized toll out of the program.b) The effects of early school start on language skills and school performance of immigrant children.

The research is motivated by recent policy initiatives which favor mandatory pre-school from age 5 to improve language skills of immigrant children.