focuses on the material impact on receiving communities. Verme and Schuettler (2021) survey that literature and argue that it broadly shows that the impact on host communities’ employment and wages are not significant, but that when results are significant, they are often negative on employment and positive on wages, albeit in the short run. Hennig (2021) extends this to show that the presence of refugee shelters in Germany may result on downward pressure on rent prices, contributing to opposition to immigration. In contrast, Dempster et al. (2020) look at survey data to argue that there is no inevitable relationship between these types of material and economic effects and people’s attitudes to refugees. The literature assessing the impact of refugees in low- and middle-income countries shows that refugees can stimulate host economies (Alix-Garcia et al. 2018; Maystadt and Duranton 2018; Taylor et al. 2016) but also have negative impacts, for example by undermining health (Baez 2011; Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2007) and competing for scarce resources and jobs (Depetris-Chauvin and Santos 2018; Tumen 2016; Ruiz and Vargas-Silva 2015). The total effect is mixed, with some benefiting and some losing from refugee presence (Fallah et al. 2019; Maystadt and Verwimp 2014; Alix-Garcia and Saah 2009).

The literature aiming to test the contact hypothesis with refugee and host populations mostly focuses on European countries. While most studies conclude that refugee-host contact has negative effects on host attitudes towards refugees, effects and mechanisms seem to vary with the context and the intensity of exposure. Exploiting a natural experiment in Greece, Dinas et al. (2019) show that exposure to the mass influx of asylum seekers during the European refugee crisis leads to an increase in right-wing support on the Greek islands. The mechanisms they identify are sociotropic and relate to the perceived negative impact of influx on culture. Exploiting the quasi-random settlement of refugees in Sweden between 1985 and 1994, Rozo and Urbina (2020) find migration shocks are associated with lower support for immigration. Here, the result appears to be largely driven by attitude change among young males working in low-wage blue-collar occupations. Ajzenman et al. (2020) explore the impact of exposure to mass transit migration in the Eastern Mediterranean during the refugee crisis on the attitudes and beliefs of ‘natives.’ They find that ‘natives’ entrepreneurship falls substantially and anti-migrant sentiment increases in localities that are close to migrant routes compared to those further away. Dustmann et al. (2019) use election data to explore the effect of the quasi-random allocation of refugees to municipalities (or not) on voting shares for anti-immigration parties. They find that in most municipalities, the allocation of larger refugee shares leads to an increase in voting for anti-immigration – parties. However, in large and urban municipalities in which interactions between ‘natives’ and refugees might be assumed to be greater – the pattern is the opposite. Steinmayr (2021) uses exit poll data from the September 2015 elections in Austria to show short-term exposure to transiting refugees increased Far Right voting, whereas sustained contact decreased Far Right voting. Also in Austria, Halla et al. (2017) combine census data and election results at the community-level and find that refugee inflows significantly increased Far Right voting. They find suggestive evidence that voters worry about negative effects 9