How mastery (doesn’t) change in reaction to external (non-personalized) events – evidence from a refugee shock
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Presented by: Natalia Malancu
The arrival of asylum seekers in Western European countries after 2015 has renewed debates on their likely impact and how best to cope with the inflow of refugees. While we know about the potential impact of immigrants and refugees theoretically, and despite literature on the economic and attitudinal effects of immigration on mainstream society, we do not understand well how forced migration and refugees affect the resident population, particularly in Europe. We lack good evidence of the likely long-term impact and how to best handle the integration of immigrants and refugees.
In this paper, we focus on an underexplored area in the Europe-centered migration literature: the changes in the well-being of the resident population subsequent to refugee flows. Specifically, we narrowly define well-being in terms of mastery- the sense of having control over the forces that affect one's life. In a review of control-related concepts, Skinner (1996) states that "a sense of control is a robust predictor of physical and mental well-being" (549). For some, perceived control is viewed as a "more powerful predictor of functioning than actual control" (551).
Past well-being literature has largely been unable to distinguish immigrants of different origins. Betz and Simpson (2013) find a short-term positive effect of aggregate immigration flows on the subjected well-being of natives in 26 European Countries. Further closer to our aim, Akay et al. identify a positive, albeit small, effect of the spatial concentration of immigrants (2014) and the ethnic diversity of immigrant groups (2016) on the well-being of native Germans. Similarly, Ivlevs and Veliziotis (2018) find a negative effect of immigrant flows from A8 countries on the self-reported well-being of the UK natives. However, Howley et al. (2018) observe no significant effects of the foreign-born population on UK natives. We intended to advance this burgeoning causal literature by focusing on a singular refugee group and its spatial concentration's long-term impact within one country.
We examine the situation in Switzerland for two practical reasons. The exogenous arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the 1990s provides a quasi-experimental setup for causal identification. There are clear 'shocks' in refugee arrivals that allow enough time to observe long-term changes. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the war started in Bosnia (1991-1995), and up to 1997, the annual number of asylum applications from Yugoslavian refugees in Switzerland fluctuated between 7,000 and 13,000. The war period in Kosovo (1998-1999) is characterized by a distinct spike in the number of asylum applications (around 31,000).
Our second reason is that we could obtain data access to implement our quasi-experimental setup. We employ data from three sources: the Swiss Health Survey (1992, 1997, and 2002), the Swiss Census (11980 and 990), and Statistics of the Foreign Resident Population (PETRA) (1997 and 2002). Given the cross-sectional nature of the health data, our empirical strategy applies a pseudo-panel generalized difference-in-differences approach to compare regions that were refugee-receiving (treated) and not refugee-receiving (control). This strategy is relevant in the Swiss context because asylum seekers are dispersed quasi-randomly within Switzerland.
In this paper, we focus on an underexplored area in the Europe-centered migration literature: the changes in the well-being of the resident population subsequent to refugee flows. Specifically, we narrowly define well-being in terms of mastery- the sense of having control over the forces that affect one's life. In a review of control-related concepts, Skinner (1996) states that "a sense of control is a robust predictor of physical and mental well-being" (549). For some, perceived control is viewed as a "more powerful predictor of functioning than actual control" (551).
Past well-being literature has largely been unable to distinguish immigrants of different origins. Betz and Simpson (2013) find a short-term positive effect of aggregate immigration flows on the subjected well-being of natives in 26 European Countries. Further closer to our aim, Akay et al. identify a positive, albeit small, effect of the spatial concentration of immigrants (2014) and the ethnic diversity of immigrant groups (2016) on the well-being of native Germans. Similarly, Ivlevs and Veliziotis (2018) find a negative effect of immigrant flows from A8 countries on the self-reported well-being of the UK natives. However, Howley et al. (2018) observe no significant effects of the foreign-born population on UK natives. We intended to advance this burgeoning causal literature by focusing on a singular refugee group and its spatial concentration's long-term impact within one country.
We examine the situation in Switzerland for two practical reasons. The exogenous arrival of refugees from former Yugoslavia in the 1990s provides a quasi-experimental setup for causal identification. There are clear 'shocks' in refugee arrivals that allow enough time to observe long-term changes. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the war started in Bosnia (1991-1995), and up to 1997, the annual number of asylum applications from Yugoslavian refugees in Switzerland fluctuated between 7,000 and 13,000. The war period in Kosovo (1998-1999) is characterized by a distinct spike in the number of asylum applications (around 31,000).
Our second reason is that we could obtain data access to implement our quasi-experimental setup. We employ data from three sources: the Swiss Health Survey (1992, 1997, and 2002), the Swiss Census (11980 and 990), and Statistics of the Foreign Resident Population (PETRA) (1997 and 2002). Given the cross-sectional nature of the health data, our empirical strategy applies a pseudo-panel generalized difference-in-differences approach to compare regions that were refugee-receiving (treated) and not refugee-receiving (control). This strategy is relevant in the Swiss context because asylum seekers are dispersed quasi-randomly within Switzerland.