Refugees and Other Forcibly Displaced Populations

This literature review focuses on economic research examining the outcomes of refugee and forced migration populations, as well as the effects on host communities. The review aims to comprehensively capture literature from 2010 onwards. The papers are categorised into several key themes: Firms, Prices and Welfare, Labour, Hosts, Climate Change, Education, Politics, Asylum-Dispersal Policies, Literature Reviews, Gender, Health, Housing, Networks and Social Cohesion, and Crime.

The process began with a general search on Google Scholar to identify foundational papers related to refugee and forced displacement populations worldwide. Subsequently, a targeted search was conducted within the top five economic journals—The American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies—to identify studies addressing refugee-related topics.

Building on these initial findings, the review expanded to include field-specific journals that focus on migration and development. The primary journals consulted were the International Migration Review, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of Population Economics. Among these, the Journal of Development Economics emerged as the most prolific source of economic literature on the subject.

Additionally, the IZA Discussion Paper Series was utilised as a significant resource, given its extensive collection of working papers on this topic. Many papers identified through the IZA repository had already been published in peer-reviewed journals, further enhancing the robustness of the pool of articles.

To refine the review and ensure comprehensiveness, the cited references within the literature reviews of each article were analyzed to identify additional works directly relevant to the objectives of this study.

We included all the papers in the Online Appendix published with the literature review.