for helpful suggestions, and to Christopher Ruhm for his assistance with recoding the CDC causes of death data. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
This paper estimates how local conditions at the time of immigration influence later outcomes for refugee immigrants to Norway, exploiting the quasiexperimental nature of the Norwegian system for settlement for "quota" or resettlement refugees. A unique administrative dataset with assigned settlement municipalities is used to identify the causal effect of initial location characteristics. Being placed in a labor market where other non-OECD immigrants do well increases own annual labor earnings up to 6 years after immigration. Extended models suggest that this effect is not driven by individual scarring effects: when controlling for the contemporaneous employment rate in the assigned region, effects of initial conditions disappear. Rather, the effects appear to be due to persistence in local labor market conditions combined with limited geographical mobility in response to adverse labor market conditions.
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