The Effects of Integrating Refugees into Thai Local Labor Markets

Does granting refugees access to formal employment increase income and reduce reliance on humanitarian assistance? How should such reforms be implemented to maximize benefits while minimizing crowd-out? We evaluate Thailand’s recent decision to grant work permits to over 80,000 refugees from Myanmar using a two-sided randomized design embedded in the government’s rollout. On the firm side, we randomize facilitation support for around 1,000 firms to generate variation in refugee hiring in partnership with UNHCR and the Thai government. Among refugees shortlisted by firms, we randomize job offers for approximately 3,000 individuals. We plan to implement a location-level saturation design (assigning locations to high or low numbers of refugees matched to jobs located there) to study potential impacts on non-experimental firms and workers. Access to future firm and worker census data will allow us to measure these impacts at no additional cost. Baseline activities are funded; JOI/SPI funding would be used for household endline surveys to measure refugee-side impacts.