Thread: bsky.app/profile/plve...

More like Mediocre or Crackpot.

Now out as an @rfberlin.bsky.social discussion paper: www.rfberlin.com/network-pape...

More fun facts and figures about Ukrainian refugees in Poland and their businesses in our paper and its thick appendix 🤓: cevatgirayaksoy.com/wp-content/u...

Supporting refugees' entrepreneurship is good, not only for their integration, but also for business dynamism in host communities 🔥🔥🔥 Slow asylum processes, work restrictions, and obstacles to accessing banking, are a lose-lose.

We check for such crowding out effects and find quite the opposite. A shift-share IV based on refugees across counties and their comparative advantaged across sectors suggests a positive multiplier effect: a 10% increase in Ukrainian registrations led to 2.31% more Polish firms!

Is this necessarily a good thing? Not if it crowds out entrepreneurship by the native born, which is an effect that's been pointed out by previous research and could be at play here...

We surveyed Ukrainian entrepreneurs and found that 58% of those who started their business from Feb 2022 had registered as refugees. This implies that Ukrainian refugees are indeed more entrepreneurial than the native-born. 🕴️

We show that along the refugees came a wave of new businesses: Ukrainians started 38,833 firms in 2022–23, accounting for 7% of all new registrations in Poland.

We focus on the business creation effects of this refugee wave. Why business creation? Because it's been established that migrants (in the US) are most entrepreneurial, and their firms are most productive and innovative. Is it the case for refugees too? The media suggests so...

In Poland, there was an immediate and extensive grassroots effort to aid and welcome refugees across the country. Ukrainians were granted access to almost all social benefits and public services on a par with Polish citizens upon arrival in Poland. They were part of the formal economy upon arrival.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in Feb 2022 displaced more than six million Ukrainians, with
Poland hosting around one million refugees.

I mean it did stop the far right guy who won the election from doing crazy things to the country, no?

Here's a recording on YouTube: youtu.be/6_J_gYGc8eM?...