profile is defined by refugees who arrived recently (after the year 2010) in Switzerland, whereas the upper part is determined by cohorts who arrived in Switzerland in the 2000s or even earlier. Third, there are some small differences between the cohorts. In particular, the two cohorts arrived between 2004 and 2009 seem to have increased their employment rates more rapidly in the initial years after their arrival.<sup>29</sup> A similar phenomenon seems to arise in the first year after their arrival (year “0”) for the most recent cohorts. This might be due to recent changes in policy at the canton level, anticipating the federal reform of 2019, which had been discussed several years before its implementation.

Another important variable for labor market integration is the refugees’ age at arrival. We would expect that the younger a refugee is at arrival, the easier it would be for him to integrate in the local labor market. On the other hand, the level of education also plays an important role in the integration process. Refugees are rather young (their median age at arrival is 27 years) and a large proportion among them is too young to have had the opportunity to get access to higher education in their home country before their flight. This is reflected in our sample: on average, only 14% of refugees have a tertiary education degree and those who were younger than 25 years at arrival are even less likely to hold a tertiary education degree.<sup>30</sup> Therefore, it is important to take education levels into account when comparing the integration trajectories for different ages at arrival. Hence we run regressions for different groups of age at arrival, using the same specification as in column (6) of Table 3, which includes education dummies and relies on the restricted sample. The results depicted in Figure 7 show that refugees who were younger at arrival integrate more rapidly into the labor market. Remarkably, the employment rates of refugees who were 18 to 20 years old at arrival increase very rapidly and attain long-run levels that are only slightly lower than those of comparable natives. On the other hand, for refugees who were older than 30 years at arrival, the employment gap is higher initially and remains around 20 percentage points even in the long run.

# **Refugees and migrants**

These results show that, with the notable exceptions of those arrived at a very young age, refugees don’t attain the high employment rates of the native working-age population. Another relevant comparison group are migrants from similar countries who arrived in Switzerland after the age of 18 years. Akin to Fasani et al. (2020a), we consider migrants from non-EU15 countries and compare their employment rates to those of natives and refugees. When comparing non-EU15 migrants with natives (using the same specifications as in Table 3), it appears that the former increase their employment rates more rapidly than refugees and reach higher levels in the long run. After one to two years in Switzerland, their employment rates are about 20 percentage points lower than those of natives; this gap is reduced to 8 percentage points in the long run (see column (6) in Table A.3 in the appendix, which takes differences in education levels into account). It seems therefore that there are differences in employment trajectories between refugees and migrants. However, this comparison does not account for differences in origin countries between migrants and refugees .

To assess whether origin countries play a role in these comparisons, we turn to a direct comparison between non-EU15 migrants and refugees. Figure 8 shows the differences in employment rates between the two groups for different specifications. The baseline does not take differences in education levels or origin countries into account. We then introduce origin countries fixed effects and education dummies, first separately, then together.<sup>31</sup> It turns out that accounting for education differences or for countries of origin yields very similar results; the combination of both does not alter this conclusion. According

> 29. This does not seem to be due to changes in education levels between cohorts. When education levels are included in regressions using the restricted sample, these effecs do not disappear. See Figure A.1 in the appendix. 30. As we observe education levels in the Structural Surveys between the years 2010 and 2017 (and not at the moment of arrival), this seems to imply that only a very small number of refugees who arrived in Switzerland between the ages of 18 and 25 years were able to obtain a tertiary education degree in Switzerland.

> 31. As above, the specifications without education levels rely on the main sample, whereas those with education dummies use the restricted sample. The detailed results of these estimations are given in Table A.4 in the appendix.

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