MiReKoc Seminar Series of Spring 2020 starts with Luis Pinedo Caro’s presentation on ‘Identifying Syrian Refugees in Turkish Microdata’. The presentation and discussion will take place on Wednesday, February 5th, 2020, at 12:00, in SOS143. Registration is required for participants not affiliated with Koç University to mirekoc@ku.edu.tr

Title: Identifying Syrian refugees in Turkish microdata

Abstract: This article proposes a strategy to identify Syrian refugees in Turkey’s Household Labour Force Survey (HLFS). Even though Turkey’s HLFS contains information on the migrants’ year of arrival to Turkey, it does not provide details on their nationalities. This unfortunate feature mixes Syrian refugees with the normal flow of migration that arrived to Turkey during the Syrian war. I propose to eliminate the regular flow of migrants arrived between 2011 and 2017 by matching them (based on their characteristics) with the migrants arrived in the 2004-2010 period. This method obtains, indirectly, non-regular migration, i.e. Syrian refugees. The results show that the age distribution of the non-regular migrants identified matches the age distribution of Syrian refugees as officially released by the Turkish government. At last, I propose a post-stratification adjustment of the survey weights to find the actual geographical distribution of Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Short-bio: Luis Pinedo is an economist of the International Labour Organization.  He is currently doing research on the working conditions held by coffee, tea and banana workers in several exporting countries. Previously, he has mainly focused on young people’s employability by developing projects on NEETs, the gig-economy and the role of internships. In addition, he has also been involved on projects regarding Syrian refugees, the role of the services’ sector as an engine of growth and global supply chains among others. Luis started studying economics in Salamanca, the city where he was born 34 years ago. Then he continued his graduate studies at the University of the Basque Country, UCD Dublin, and the University of Southampton, where he finished his PhD studies in 2014.