Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/260190 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2016:18
Publisher: 
Lund University, School of Economics and Management, Department of Economics, Lund
Abstract: 
The member states of the European Union received 1.2 million first time asylum applications in 2015 (a doubling compared to 2014). Even if asylum will be granted for many of the refugees that made the journey to Europe, several obstacles for successful integration remain. This paper focuses on one of these obstacles, namely the problem of finding housing for refugees once they have been granted asylum. In particular, the focus is restricted to the situation in Sweden during 2015–2016 and it is demonstrated that market design can play an important role in a partial solution to the problem. More specifically, because almost all accommodation options are exhausted in Sweden, the paper investigates a matching system, closely related to the system adopted by the European NGO "Refugees Welcome", and proposes an easy-to-implement mechanism that finds an efficient stable maximum matching. Such matching guarantees that housing is efficiently provided to a maximum number of refugees and that no refugee prefers some landlord to their current match when, at the same time, that specific landlord prefers that refugee to his current match.
Subjects: 
refugees
forced migration
housing markets
market design
efficient stable maximum matchings
JEL: 
C71
C78
D71
D78
F22
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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