In April, Anastasiia Voloshyna received FEB’s Research Master Graduate Award for her overall performance and her thesis on the effect of Ukrainian refugees on local labour market. Her Master’s thesis was supervised by Agnieszka Postepska and formed the basis for an article that was recently published in the Journal of Population Economics. Voloshyna is currently continuing her research on the topic as a PhD candidate at FEB. Her motivation to study this subject is personal, as she expressed in this interview.

Personal motivation

What got her into researching whether the arrival of Ukrainian refugees in early 2022 had any effect - good or bad- on local labour markets across Europe? “At conferences, which I was lucky enough to already attend during my research master, all thanks to the support of the FEB Research Institute, I usually give the standard academic answer: it’s an important topic that fills a gap in the literature. But if I’m to be more candid, I think this newsletter gives space for that, the truth is that it started from something much more personal.”

Voloshyna is Ukrainian. “In 2022, as the war broke out, I was just entering the phase of my studies where I needed to write an academic paper. And at that moment, I could think of nothing else but what was happening to my family, my friends, and my home country. I was glued to every piece of news, English, Ukrainian, and Russian, reading obsessively in an effort to understand the unfolding situation and to make sense of what might happen next, and figure out what I should do with my own life and future plans. So when the question “What will you research?” came up, given my training in applied micro-econometrics (something the University of Groningen is great at teaching) and my interest in labour economics, the topic practically formed itself.”

Voloshyna feels lucky to be paired with her current supervisor, Dr Agnieszka Postepska.  “She was incredibly supportive from the start. She placed refreshing trust in the project, even in its earliest stages, and encouraged my attempts to build the idea, find appropriate data, and reach out to statistical offices across Europe. For many months, I contacted institutions, asked about data access, and inquired about costs. After about half a year of mostly fruitless searching, it was the Czech Statistical Office that finally gave us the green light, and that’s where the research truly began.”

Gathering data

 Voloshyna and Postepska gathered granular microdata from the Czech Labour Force Survey, covering many years before the war and extending into the post-invasion period. “Alongside this, we also collected all available information about Ukrainian refugees in Czechia: their numbers, regional distribution, and demographic characteristics.

Unique as refugee stories go, Ukrainian arrivals in Czechia were granted immediate access to the labour market, vocational training, health insurance, freelance work, education, and cost-of-living allowances, thanks to the Lex Ukraine law. We wanted to see whether this fast-track integration policy led to any changes in employment probabilities, unemployment risks, or average hours worked among the local Czech population.”

Results

Interestingly, they found no statistically significant effects. “While, as the academic joke goes, finding a zero effect is a fast track to an unpublished paper, in this case, however, the absence of an effect felt like a meaningful finding. The topic is politically and socially sensitive, perhaps even more so now than when we began. Public debates on migration often focus on potential threats to the welfare system or displacement of native workers. But this case was unique: Ukrainians, unlike many other refugee groups, were granted immediate and full access to the labour market. And Czechia, per capita, took in more Ukrainian refugees than any other country in the world. If ever there were a case where one might expect to detect labour market disruptions, this would be it. But we found none, not for Czechia, and not in the short term, anyway.”

Other countries

Voloshyna and Postepka’s results however cannot necessarily be applied to other countries. “Czechia had a uniquely receptive labour market just before the refugee influx, boasting the EU’s lowest unemployment rate and more than a quarter of a million open vacancies, most of them in low-skilled sectors. These were precisely the sectors where Ukrainian refugees found work, helping to fill long-standing gaps. This combination of high labour demand and existing shortages likely eased any potential disruptions, allowing the economy to integrate refugees relatively smoothly in the short run.”

Conclusion

Voloshyna hopes that what began from a personal place, has turned into something that is meaningful to others as well. “At the very least, our research was seen, it was published in IFO Schnelldienst, in VoxEU, and later in the Journal of Population Economics, which was both exciting and encouraging. And the fact that the research touched on something I cared about gave me the energy, and, frankly, the stubbornness, to keep chasing the data, to rewrite, and to deal with the many rounds of referee comments.”

Voloshyna as a message for other students starting out in academic work. “Sometimes, choosing a topic that means something to you personally might just be the best place to begin, and if you're fortunate enough to have a supportive supervisor as well, that turns into a powerful combination.”

Questions? Please contact Anastasiia Voloshyna.