The paper examines the patterns of economic integration

of refugees in Switzerland, a country with a long tradition

of hosting refugees, a top-receiving host in Europe, and a

prominent example of a multicultural society. It relies on

a unique longitudinal dataset consisting of administrative

records and social security data for the universe of refu-

gees in Switzerland over 1998–2018. This data is used to

reconstruct the individual-level trajectories of refugees and

to follow them since arrival over the life-cycle. The study

documents the patterns of labor-market integration, and

highlights the heterogeneity by gender and age at arrival.

Refugees’ labor-market performance is compared to natives’

and other groups of migrants’ labor-market performance.

The empirical analysis exploits the government dispersal

policy in place since 1998, which consists of the random

allocation of refugees across cantons, to identify the causal

effects of the local initial conditions. The study finds

that higher unemployment rates at arrival slow down the

integration process, whereas the existence of a co-ethnic net-

work does not consistently lead to a faster integration. It is

shown that in locations where refugees face relatively more

hostile attitudes by natives upon arrival, they integrate at a

faster pace, probably due to a greater effort undertaken in

environments that are more hostile. Together these results,

highlight the importance of an early entry in the labor

market of the host country, and the need to take a longer

run perspective when examining the effectiveness of policies,

as the effects may vary over time and different complemen-

tary interventions may be needed in the short vs. long-run.