especially for attitudes. The latter result might be explained by an asymmetry between the effects of attitudes becoming more restrictive, on the one hand, and attitudes becoming more open, on the other hand. If the latter effect is smaller than the former, this could explain the smaller effect found for the German-speaking region (where attitudes are improving in several cantons). Finally, the network variable has a positive effect in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. It is not clear whether this is due to cultural differences or to the particular geographic position of this canton.

We conclude our discussion of the role of initial conditions by focusing on the gender dimension (see Tables A.9 to A.12 in the appendix). Again, we only consider the results for the main sample. The effect of attitudes seems to be more persistent for female refugees although the average effect over the life-cycle is close to the one for male refugees. For women, the effect tends to increase over time whereas it is strongest for men around 3–5 years after arrival and decreases thereafter. The impact of unemployment also grows stronger over time for female refugees but not for male. Interestingly, the impact of co-national networks becomes significant, but with opposite sign, for male and female refugees. Female refugees seem to benefit from networks (even in the long run), whereas for male refugees the negative effects dominate, especially in the short run. A possible explanation of the positive effect for women is that they benefit from child care services within their co-national network, enabling them to increase their labor market participation.

Finally, we carry out a robustness test which addresses the concern that refugees who move out of the assigned canton might influence the results. We already mentioned that few refugees actually do so but we check if these observations might have an influence on our results. We therefore run all our regressions on a sample from which we drop the observations where the canton of residence differs from the initially assigned canton (7.5% of observations). There are hardly any differences between these results and those reported in Tables 4, 5 and 6.<sup>42</sup>

# **6 Concluding Remarks and Policy Implications**

In this paper, we analyze the integration of refugees in the Swiss labor market by looking at trajectories of employment rates and by analyzing the impact of initial conditions on these trajectories. We combine data from a longitudinal dataset, which covers the universe of refugees and migrants in Switzerland over 1998-2018, with data on attitudes toward refugees and migrants, which are derived from popular voting outcomes at the canton level. We find that, on average, the employment rates of refugees increase slowly over time to reach, ten years after their arrival, a level which is about 15 percentage points lower than the employment rates of comparable natives. However, this integration profile depends on the refugees’ age upon arrival: those who were younger at arrival integrate more rapidly into the labor market and attain higher employment rates in the long run. We also consider migrants from non EU-15 countries as a comparison group. According to our estimates, which take differences in origin countries into account, labor market integration takes more time for refugees than for migrants, although the convergence seems slightly more rapid than in other European countries (Fasani et al. 2020a). Ten years after arrival, employment rates of refugees are 4 percentage points lower than those of migrants and this difference persists in the long run. There are some gender differences. Employment rates of male refugees increase initially more rapidly than employment rates for female refugees but native-refugee employment gaps are similar for men and women in the long run.

When we investigate the impact of initial conditions on the employment of refugees over the lifecycle, we find significant negative effects of initial unemployment rates on employment probabilities of refugees, and positive effects of initial (restrictive) attitudes toward refugees and immigrants.<sup>43</sup> Both

> 42. These estimation results are available upon request.

> 43. The results for co-national networks are inconclusive. We do not find a significant effect in the aggregate, but a significant positive effect of networks on the employment of female refugees and a significant negative effect for male refugees.

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