Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity approach, we evaluate the effectiveness of a teacher training program aiming to improve school outcomes of refugee students. The program halves the absenteeism gap between native and refugee students, and its effect persists into the next academic year. It also improves the grades of refugee students in Turkish language and math, and there is a positive association between improved attendance and grades. One possible channel through which the program's effects may operate is a school-wide champion role assumed by trained teachers, which has a broad impact on raising diversity awareness within schools.

We study the education gap between Syrian refugee children and their Turkish peers using administrative data from Turkiye (2011-2018). Our analysis reveals significant disparities: Refugee students score 8 points lower in mathematics and 13 points lower in Turkish language on average. These gaps narrow with time and grade progression, with the most improvement seen in the first two years after arrival. Female refugees adapt more effectively, closing the gap faster than males. Our findings highlight the need for targeted interventions, such as early language training and support programs, to improve refugee integration and promote equitable educational outcomes.

This paper examines the causal impact of a large-scale Turkish language training program on the academic performance, school participation, and mental well-being of Syrian refugee children in T¨urkiye. Using rich administrative data and a staggered difference-in-differences design, we find that the program led to improvements in Turkish language and Math scores of refugee students, along with a significant reduction in their school absences. The language gains and associated improvements in school outcomes are more pronounced for younger refugee children with lower pre-program academic performance, which suggests that early language interventions are more effective for integration. In addition, we provide evidence that the language training program generated modest positive spillovers on native students. Finally, we identify mental health as a potential key channel through which the program enhanced educational outcomes, as alleviating language barriers improved concentration, reduced anxiety, and decreased bullying. Our findings underline the critical role of language training in improving refugee students' educational outcomes and mental well-being, and fostering social cohesion.

This paper estimates the causal effect of a targeted panic button program—implemented in two Turkish provinces between 2012 and 2016—on domestic violence. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimates suggest that the program notably increased physical violence against women both at the extensive and intensive margins. The likelihood of physical violence in the treated provinces increased by more than 5 percentage points relative to the control provinces, and the number of physical violence incidents increased by about 10 percent. The increase comes almost entirely from the increase in violence against less-educated women. Employment rates and economic independence indicators improved for women in the treated provinces, which suggests that the program empowered vulnerable women. However, male partners increased physical violence in response to female empowerment. The results are consistent with the male backlash theories and a class of non-cooperative models incorporating violence as a vehicle for enhancing males’ bargaining power, but inconsistent with the models predicting that economic empowerment of women reduces violence by balancing bargaining power within the household. We also develop a method based on retrospective violence information to understand whether the increase is attributable to actual or self-reported violence and conclude that the estimates are entirely driven by the increase in actual violence.

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We analyze the impact on crime of 3.7 million refugees who entered and stayed in Turkey as a result of the civil war in Syria. Using a novel administrative data source on the flow of offense records to prosecutors' offices in 81 provinces of the country each year, and utilizing the staggered movement of refugees across provinces over time, we estimate instrumental variables models that address potential endogeneity of the number of refugees and their location, and find that an increase in the number of refugees leads to more crime. We estimate that the influx of refugees between 2012 and 2016 generated additional 75,000 to 150,000 crimes per year, although it is not possible to identify the distribution of these crimes between refugees and natives. Additional analyses reveal that low-educated native population has a separate, but smaller, effect on crime. We also highlight the pitfalls of employing incorrect empirical procedures and using poor proxies of criminal activity which produce the wrong inference about the refugee-crime relationship. Our results underline the need to quickly strengthen the social safety systems, to take actions to dampen the impact on the labor market, and to provide support to the criminal justice system in order to mitigate the repercussions of massive influx of individuals into a country, and to counter the social and political backlash that typically emerges in the wake of such large-scale population movements.

Employers use various proxies to predict the future labor productivity levels of the job applicants. Success in school, especially in high-level coursework, is among the most widely used proxies to screen the entry-level candidates. We estimate the causal effect of graduating with honors – i.e., with a GPA of 3.00 and above out of 4.00 – on the starting wages of economics majors in Türkiye. Using comprehensive micro data on all economics majors between 2014-2018, matched with administrative records about their first jobs, we implement a regression discontinuity analysis to investigate whether there is any statistically significant jump in the starting wages at the honors-degree cutoff. We find that graduating with honors increases the wages of males, while there is no impact on females. We further document that the impact on males is almost entirely driven by the graduates of non-elite universities. In particular, graduating with an honors degree increases the entry wages of males from non-elite universities by about 4 percent, on average. We provide an explanation for these patterns using the theory of statistical discrimination. We discuss the potential reasons behind the heterogeneous signal value of graduating with honors between males versus females and elite versus non-elite university graduates.

Despite efforts to integrate refugee children into host country education systems, their low school attachment, poor academic performance, and high drop-out rates remain major policy challenges. Teachers can have important impacts on these student outcomes, yet classroom diversity poses difficulties for teachers who may not always be adequately prepared to address the needs of minority students. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity approach, we evaluate whether a teacher training program—designed to raise awareness among primary and secondary school teachers in Türkiye based on a cascade-training approach—is effective in improving school outcomes of refugee students. We find that the program almost halves the absenteeism gap between native and refugee students, and its effect persists into the next academic year, albeit fading in size. We also find that the program improves the grades of refugee students in Turkish language and Math subjects, and that there is a positive association between improved attendance and grades. One possible channel through which the effects of the program may operate is a school-wide champion role assumed by trained teachers, which has a broad impact on raising diversity awareness within schools.

This paper presents new evidence on the causal link between fertility and female labor supply by focusing on how informal employment interacts with maternal labor supply. We employ an IV strategy based on an unused data source for twin births in Turkey|a large middle-income country with extensive labor informality. We find that, following the first birth, female labor supply declines significantly and mothers who drop out of labor force are mostly the informally employed ones. This is contrary to the perception that informal jobs might be easier to sustain during motherhood as they are more flexible. Following further increases in family size, formally employed mothers start dropping out of labor force and their hours of work also decline. Higher fertility also leads to lower wages and lower job search intensity among mothers. We document substantial differences between maternal versus paternal labor supply in response to changes in family size. Unlike mothers, fathers increase their labor supply, which mostly comes from elevated informal employment|possibly due to a decline in their reservation wages. As a result, wages decline, hours of work increase, and job search activity shifts from formal to informal search methods for fathers. These results suggest that higher fertility might be associated with increased vulnerabilities and high labor income risks in countries with pervasive labor informality. Our estimates are robust to using alternative IV specifications based on gender composition of siblings.

Tackling with the socioeconomic consequences of forced displacement and addressing the challenges of integrating refugee populations have been among the most pressing global policy issues recently. Building on the lessons learned from past crises to develop more effective mitigation and prevention policies is of utmost importance for the welfare of all individuals around the world. This paper presents a broad overview of the socioeconomic integration of some 3.5 million Syrian refugees in Türkiye, with a particular focus on the existing policies, key takeaways, and challenges ahead. The discussion is organized around five topics. First, the paper briefly discusses the background and complex political nature of the Syrian civil conflict. Second, it provides a snapshot of the Syrian population in Türkiye by displaying their numbers, movement patterns, regional composition, and characteristics. Third, it discusses the integration policy framework implemented by the Turkish government, with a particular focus on labor market, education, health, and social protection policies. Fourth, it reviews the academic literature studying the impact of refugee influx on various key outcomes of both nationals and refugees. Finally, it discusses the main challenges faced and lessons learned during the refugee crisis, and briefly discusses the implications of the devastating February 2023 Kahramanmaras-Hatay earthquakes for the refugee integration issues.

Findings in the literature suggest that the sudden and often massive nature of refugee inflows, combined with the fact that housing supply is mostly unresponsive in the short-term, has the potential to affect housing prices and generate substantial changes in housing preferences, neighborhood quality/amenities, mobility patterns of hosts, and attitudes toward refugees in receiving areas. The interaction between the location preferences of refugees and the actions taken by hosts in response to refugee inflows may lead to residential segregation, urban poverty, high economic inequality, and unsustainable cities in the long-term. Policy lessons suggest options like transforming camps (that may have become socioeconomically attractive locations) into sustainable settlements, utilizing voucher programs, and incentivizing government-financed housing solutions for refugees.

Can high-quality local governance alleviate the environmental impact of large-scale refugee migration? The recent surge in refugee flows has brought additional challenges to local governments in Europe, the Middle East, and certain regions of Africa and Asia. In this paper, we focus on the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey and show that quality of local governance plays a critical role in mitigating environmental deterioration. Following the World Bank's Local Governance Performance Index, we employ text analysis methods to construct a unique data set on local governance quality from the independent audit reports on municipalities. Using an instrumental variable strategy, we show that the Syrian refugee influx has worsened environmental outcomes along several dimensions in Turkey. Specifically, we find that the deterioration in environmental outcomes is almost entirely driven by provinces with poor-quality governance. Those provinces fail to invest sufficiently in waste management practices and environmental services in response to increased refugee settlements. We argue that good local governance practices can smooth out the refugee integration process and complement the efforts of central governments.

Despite efforts to integrate refugee children into host country education systems, their low school attachment remains a major policy challenge. Teachers play a key role in keeping students attached to school, yet classroom diversity poses difficulties for teachers who are not always adequately prepared to address the needs of minority students. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity approach, we evaluate whether a teacher training program—designed to raise awareness of primary and secondary school teachers in Turkey—is effective in reducing absenteeism of refugee students. We find that the program almost halves the absenteeism gap between native and refugee students and its effect persists into the next academic year, albeit fading out in size. We argue that the most likely channel through which the effects of the program operate is a school-wide mentorship role acquired by trained teachers, which has broad impact on raising diversity awareness within schools.

Existing evidence suggests that low-skilled refugee influx may increase educational attainment among native adolescents due to reduced opportunities and returns in the lower segment of the labor market. In this paper, I test whether refugee influx can also increase the intensity of human capital accumulation among native adolescents who are enrolled in school. Using the PISA micro data and implementing a quasi-experimental empirical strategy designed to exploit (i) the time variation in regional refugee intensity and (ii) institutional setting in the Turkish public education system, I show that the Math, Science, and Reading scores of Turkish adolescents increased following the Syrian refugee influx. The increase in test scores mostly comes from the lower half of the test score distribution and from native adolescents with lower maternal education. The empirical design embeds a framework where the estimated refugee impact can solely be attributed to the labor market mechanism. In particular, I use the observation that refugee adolescents are enrolled more systematically into the Turkish education system after 2016, which gave me the opportunity to use 2015 and 2018 PISA waves in a way to isolate the effect of the labor market mechanism from the potentially negating force coming from the education experience mechanism. I conclude that the labor market forces that emerged in the aftermath of the refugee crisis have led native adolescents, who would normally perform worse in school, to take their high school education more seriously.

We present cross-country evidence suggesting that agricultural credits have a positive impact on agricultural productivity. In particular, we find that doubling agricultural credits generates around 4–5% increase in agricultural productivity. We use two different agricultural production measures: (i) the agricultural component of GDP and (ii) agricultural labor productivity. Employing a combination of panel-data and instrumental-variable methods, we show that agricultural credits operate mostly on the agricultural component of GDP in developing countries and agricultural labor productivity in developed countries. This suggests that the nature of the relationship between agricultural finance and agricultural output changes along the development path. We conjecture that the development of the agricultural finance system generates entry into the agricultural labor market, which pushes up the agricultural component of GDP and keeps down agricultural labor productivity in developing countries; while, in developed countries, it leads to labor-augmenting increase in agricultural production. We argue that replacement of the informal credit channel with formal and advanced agricultural credit markets along the development path is the main force driving the labor market response.

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Native children switch from public to private primary schools in response to increased refugee concentration in the Turkish public education system. 10 percentage-point increase in refugee-to-population ratio generates, on average, 0.12 percentage-point increase in private primary school enrollment. This roughly corresponds to 1 native child switching to private education for every 31.6 refugee children enrolled in public schools—weaker than the typical estimates in the literature.