Dominik Hangartner

Background: Forcibly displaced people (FDP) are frequently exposed to multiple stressors and adversities, increasing their risk of developing mental health problems. However, they often face significant barriers to accessing adequate mental health care. To improve access to evidence-based psychological support, the World Health Organization developed Problem Management Plus (PM+), a brief, low-intensity psychological intervention delivered by trained non-specialists, aimed to alleviate common mental disorders among individuals affected by adversity. The outlined study will evaluate the effectiveness of PM+ augmented with additional homework reminders and three booster sessions when delivered in a real-world setting. Methods: A pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted with 1,000 FDP in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland. Adult FDP with elevated psychological distress (≥ 20 on the Kessler-10 Psychological Distress Scale) will be randomly assigned to either the augmented PM+ intervention group ( n = 667) or care as usual group ( n = 333). Outcome assessments will be conducted at 3, 6, and 12 months after baseline assessment. The primary outcome is psychological distress at 3-month follow-up, measured by the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25. Secondary outcomes include post-traumatic stress symptoms, general psychological distress, somatic symptoms, post-migration stressors, level of social integration, suicidal ideation, at 3, 6, and 12-months. Discussion: This trial will provide evidence on the effectiveness of augmented PM + and its feasibility for integration into the Swiss health care system. If effective, the intervention will be adapted and tested in other regions and settings in Switzerland, with the goal of establishing a sustainable implementation strategy within national mental health services. Trial registration: ClinicalClinicalTrials.gov: NCT06776523. Prospectively registered on 09 January 2025.

Governments face persistent challenges in integrating refugees into the local labor market, and many past interventions have shown limited impact. This study examines the Job-Turbo program, a large-scale initiative launched by the German government in 2023 to accelerate employment among refugees—primarily individuals from Ukraine and eight other major countries of origin. Using monthly administrative panel data from Germany’s network of public employment service offices and a difference-in-differences design, we find that the program significantly increased both caseworker–refugee contact and job placements over a 23-mo follow-up period. Among Ukrainian refugees, the exit-to-job rate nearly doubled. Effects were broad-based—spanning demographic subgroups, unemployment durations, skill levels, regions, and local labor-market conditions—and were concentrated in regular, unsubsidized employment. The program also raised both the rate and share of placements followed by sustained employment, consistent with improved placement quality. Other refugee groups saw meaningful gains as well, but increases in job placements were concentrated among males and in low-skilled jobs, with only limited effects for females. We detect no negative spillovers on contact rates or exit-to-job rates for unemployed German or other immigrant job seekers, finding no evidence of resource reallocation or displacement. The results offer insights for governments responding to displacement crises. They indicate that intensified job-search assistance—embedded within the early stage of integration and implemented at scale through public employment infrastructure—can meaningfully improve refugees’ labor-market outcomes, even amid significant arrivals.

Extensive research on judicial politics has documented disparities in adjudication and biases in judging. Yet, lacking statistical methods to infer individual preferences from group decisions, existing studies have focused on courts publishing individual judges’ opinions, leaving a gap in understanding collegial courts that report only collective and unanimous (‘per curiam’) panel decisions. We introduce a statistical methodology to identify the most fitting decision-theoretic models for such collective decisions, infer judges’ individual preferences, and quantify the inconsistency in the courts’ decisions. This methodology is applicable in various small group decision-making contexts where group assignments are repeated and exogenous. Applying it to the Swiss appellate court for asylum appeals, where decisions are made in three-judge panels, we find that in 45 per cent of cases, the chair-as-dictator rule applies (rather than majority rule). Although judges’ preferences vary strongly with partisanship, the partially collective decision making of the panel moderates this heterogeneity.

Amid the Ukrainian displacement crisis, private hosting of refugees in Europe has surged, yet its impact on integration remains understudied. This research examines the short- to medium-term effects of private hosting on Ukrainian refugee integration in Germany. Using data from one of the largest non-profit platforms that matches private hosts with refugees, we compare the multidimensional integration outcomes of refugees who were matched with private hosts to those of observably similar refugees who applied for private hosting but were not matched (n = 1,700). Our findings show significant improvements in the social, psychological and navigational integration of privately hosted refugees, with no discernible effects on linguistic, economic or political integration. This study provides causal evidence on the effectiveness of private hosting in enhancing refugee integration, underscoring its potential to complement traditional public asylum reception and housing systems, and to harness civil society engagement for refugee integration during humanitarian crises.

Regression discontinuity designs (RDD) are widely used in the social sciences to estimate causal effects from observational data. Following recent methodological advances, scholars can choose from various RDD estimators for point estimation and inference. This decision is mainly guided by theoretical results on optimality and Monte Carlo simulations because of a paucity of research on the performance of the different estimators in recovering real-world experimental benchmarks. Leveraging exact ties in personal votes in local elections in Colombia and Finland, which are resolved by a random lottery, we assess the performance of various estimators featuring different polynomial degrees, bias-correction methods, optimal bandwidths, and approaches to statistical inference. Using re-running and re-election as outcomes, we document only minor differences in the performance of the various implementation approaches when the conditional expectation function (CEF) of the outcomes in the vicinity of the discontinuity is close to linear. When approximating the curvature of the CEF is more challenging, bias-corrected and robust inference with coverage-error-rate-optimal bandwidths comes closer to the experimental benchmark than more widely used alternative implementations.

The main theories explaining electoral backlash against immigration focus on citizens’ cultural, economic, and security concerns. We test these predictions in Switzerland, which opened its labor market to neighboring countries in the 2000s. Employing a difference-in-differences design, we document a substantial rise in immigrant workers in Swiss border municipalities after the border opened. This was accompanied by a 6-percentage-point (95% confidence interval 2–10) increase in support for anti-immigrant parties, equivalent to a 32% rise at the mean. However, we find no adverse effects on citizens’ employment, wages, or subjective perceptions of economic, cultural, or security threats. Instead, we describe how far-right parties introduced novel narratives related to overcrowding to advance hostility toward immigrants. We provide evidence that this rhetoric targeted border municipalities, where it had the greatest impact on voters susceptible to political persuasion. Together, these findings suggest that elites can play a role in driving anti-immigrant votes.

Protracted global conflicts during the past decade have led to repeated major humanitarian protection crises in Europe. During the height of the Syrian refugee crisis at the end of 2015, Europe hosted around 2.3 million people requesting asylum¹. Today, the ongoing war in Ukraine has resulted in one of the largest humanitarian emergencies in Europe since World War II, with more than eight million Ukrainians seeking refuge across Europe². Here we explore whether repeated humanitarian crises threaten to exhaust solidarity and whether Europeans welcome Ukrainian asylum seekers over other asylum seekers^3,4. We conducted repeat conjoint experiments during the 2015–2016 and 2022 refugee crises, asking 33,000 citizens in 15 European countries to evaluate randomly varied profiles of asylum seekers. We find that public preferences for asylum seekers with specific attributes have remained remarkably stable and general support has, if anything, increased slightly over time. Ukrainian asylum seekers were welcomed in 2022, with their demographic, religious and displacement profile having a larger role than their nationality. Yet, this welcome did not come at the expense of support for other marginalized refugee groups, such as Muslim refugees. These findings have implications for our theoretical understanding of the drivers and resilience of public attitudes towards refugees and for policymakers tasked to find effective responses to the enduring stress on the asylum system^5–8.