and social integration. On the other hand, Jaschke et al. (2020) rely on the questions on attitudes towards migrants available in the IAB-BAMF-SOEP-Survey of Refugees. They find that more negative attitudes towards migrants lead to a faster cultural convergence of refugees. In another study focusing on Germany, Albarosa and Elsner (2021) study the 2015 refugee inflow and its impact on social cohesion. The authors find no evidence that the inflow of refugees had an impact on social attitudes towards foreigners. However, they do find evidence of anti-migrant violence, and this effect lasted two years following on from the refugee inflow, and was stronger in counties with higher concentration of right-wing voters and lower employment rates.

# **3.2 Theoretical Contribution and Main Hypotheses**

The specific context of Switzerland where refugees are randomly allocated across cantons that are different in terms of local labor market conditions, natives’ attitudes towards refugees and size and nature of ethnic enclaves, allows us investigating empirically the role of these determinants on refugees’ labor market outcomes and economic integration.

Our paper makes the following contributions. First, we examine the role that attitudes towards refugees at the time of arrival in the host country have on their subsequent trajectory of economic integration. As previously mentioned, the few existing studies present limitations. Here we improve in two ways. We use an objective measure of attitudes derived from voting behavior (as opposed to selfreported measures of attitudes from surveys). Moreover, we measure attitudes by also including specific attitudes towards refugees instead of focusing only on the more general attitudes towards migrants as done in the existing studies. This is very important given that economic migrants and refugees are two distinct groups of foreign-born, and attitudes towards them may be significantly different as documented in recent surveys carried out in 18 countries (Pew Research Center 2019).<sup>17</sup> Second, we examine the relative importance of the three initial conditions, namely attitudes, unemployment and co-ethnic networks. This will allow us to determine the possible interplay among them. Third, contrary to what has been done in most of the existing literature, we have a much longer time-frame. We are able to follow the same individuals over 20 years. This will allow us to examine the pattern of economic integration and how it changes over time in the short, medium and long-run.

Our empirical analysis will test the following hypotheses. Based on previous findings in the literature, we expect to find that refugees integrate in the host labor market at a slower pace compared to migrants in general (Brell et al. 2020). Moreover, we expect to find heterogeneity according to refugees’ characteristics such as gender, age at arrival, and level of educational attainment. A limited number of studies have investigated the gender difference in the labor market integration of refugees. Existing research has highlighted the relatively low educational qualification of refugee women and the fact that they are more likely to have limited work experience, which could lead to a slower integration into the labor market in the host country (e.g., Albrecht et al. (2021)). Empirical findings across several EU countries suggest that on average the initial refugee-migrant employment gap is lower for women than for men, and that women converge to employment levels of comparable migrants at a faster pace than men (Fasani et al. 2020a). Other studies focusing on migrants, have found that women start with larger initial migrant-native gaps in employment than men, they converge at a faster pace but in some cases female migrants do not converge completely to the employment outcomes of similar natives even after a decade. On the other hand, gender differences for skilled individuals have consistently been found to be smaller (Lee et al. 2020; Bratsberg et al. 2014). It is an empirical question whether our analysis will predict faster integration for refugee women than for men—given that women traditionally have larger employment gaps at arrival and several factors may affect their subsequent participation in the labor market—, but we expect to observe similar convergence speed for skilled refugees irrespective of 17. The Global Attitudes Survey was carried out by the Pew Research Center in Spring 2018. https://www.pewresearch. org/fact-tank/2019/08/09/people-around-the-world-express-more-support-for-taking-in-refugees-than-immigrants/ 9