Refugee Integration Intervention in Sweden

The Swedish Public Employment Service (PES) offers Swedish language classes to newly arrived refugees who register as unemployed. This amounts to 15 hours of education per week over the course of a two-year span.

Dahlberg et al. (2023) analyzes a randomized control trial designed to test whether additional labor market integration services can impact employment and self-assessed societal integration in the long run. In this RCT, the control group received the baseline service described above, while the treatment group received the baseline service as well as intensive language training, work practice, and job search assistance.

In particular, refugees in the treatment group received three months of intensive exposure to Swedish through additional language classes (on top of the 15 hours) as well as general classes that were taught in Swedish. This amounted to about 40 hours a week of classroom time in Swedish. The second phase was a six-month internship where participants were assigned to a supervisor who did not speak their native language in order to practice speaking Swedish in a workplace environment. In the final phase, PES caseworkers helped refugees find jobs through searching for appropriate open positions, preparing CVs, and training for interviews.

The paper links various sources of administrative data to track participants’ attendance at Swedish classes, employment status, labor income, and social assistance payments over four years (2017-2021). Additionally, the paper has access to individual characteristics including age, gender, education, country of origin, date of entry to Sweden, and crucially- treatment status in the RCT.

The paper finds that the program successfully speeds up labor market integration: despite imperfect take-up, the treatment group has an employment rate of 45 percent directly after the program, while the control group does not reach this rate until almost four years later.