Hired in High Season: Seasonal Labor Demand and Refugee Labor Market Integration

Economics > General Economics [Submitted on 19 Dec 2025 (v1), last revised 18 Jun 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Hired in High Season: Seasonal Labor Demand and Refugee Labor Market Integration View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:I examine whether early but temporary access to low-barrier hospitality employment affects refugees' labor market integration. I exploit within-region, within-year variation by combining the quasi-exogenous allocation of refugees to Austrian regions with seasonality in hospitality, where 25% of refugees first find work. Labor market access during high seasonal demand raises early employment probability by 3 percentage points (9% of the mean). Employment gains fade after one year, but treated refugees accumulate significantly higher three-year earnings, with no differences in medium-term wages or job quality. However, early hospitality work increases segregation into refugee-typical industries and firms with fewer Austrian coworkers. Submission history From: Felix Degenhardt [view email][v1] Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:22:22 UTC (3,813 KB) [v2] Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:11:56 UTC (5,965 KB) Current browse context: econ.GN References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.