Conditionally accepted at The Journal of Development Studies.
The effects of migration on outcomes such as earnings and employment are well studied, but little attention has been paid to how natives adjust their occupations to their education level when faced with a massive migration shock. This paper analyzes the effect of Syrian refugee inflows into Turkey, beginning in 2011, on the education-job matching of the native population. Using the 2004 to 2019 Turkish Household Labor Force Survey and regional refugee data, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy that accounts for the endogenous location choices of refugees. A 10 percentage point increase in the refugee-to-population ratio is associated with a reduction of about 1.2 percentage points in the likelihood of overeducation among informally employed native men, with similar associations for men who are low-educated or aged 18-34, and, in separate subgroup analyses, for young women and for low-educated women in the formal sector. As all estimates are conditional on employment, these changes are consistent with compositional shifts rather than occupational upgrading alone: low-skilled refugees compete with natives in informal work, and relatively educated workers appear to reallocate toward better-matched formal jobs. The findings highlight the role of informality and employment reallocation in this adjustment.