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This document provides a comparative assessment on the location of hosted asylum seekers in 18 European countries at the level of TL3 regions and in six countries at the municipal level. The assessment is based on an ad-hoc data collection from national statistical offices and governmental agencies in charge of monitoring the hosting of asylum seekers. The analysis aims to maximize data comparability across countries by focusing on those asylum seekers who are hosted in the reception system. Results show that, on average, asylum seekers are less concentrated in urban areas than the resident population. This result is robust at different geographical scales, namely at the scale of small administrative regions (OECD TL3), at that of functional urban areas—a comparable definition of cities applied to OECD countries—and at the municipal level. In the subset of countries where information was available, the share of asylum seekers in rural areas has on average increased between 2011 and 2015. The dispersal measures implemented in several of the countries considered might have played a role in this respect.

With 20,945 asylum applications in 2016, the Netherlands received the tenth highest number of asylum requests in Europe. From the time of their arrival, and until a decision on their asylum requests is made, asylum seekers are sheltered in asylum seeker reception centers (ASRCs) across the country. This paper tests whether the opening of reception centers affects the prices of nearby houses. In doing so, likely differential effects across urban and non-urban areas, as well as for ASRCs of distinct capacities to host asylum seekers, are considered. The analysis uses hedonic regressions that are based on a staggered difference-in-differences design. Estimation comes from 2009-2017 information on the transaction prices of houses (N = 347,479) and the locations and opening dates of nearby ASRCs (N = 75). The results indicate that the opening of ASRCs causes the prices of some houses to fall by approximately 9.3%. However, this estimated effect pertains solely to single-family houses in less densely populated areas and for ASRC of high hosting capacity, whereas in cities no economically or statistically significant effects are found. The findings of this study have implications for the design of public policies that regard the spatial dispersion of ASRCs. 'stated preferences', see for example Facchini et al. (2016), Grigorieff et al. (2017), or Hopkins et al. (2018, which may allow socially acceptable answers to impact findings. Unlike such studies, we consider preferences that are revealed in local housing markets. To our

This paper investigates the institutional and socio-economic determinants of the location of asylum seekers in the case of Italy where, to face the pressure of arrivals, a complex multi-level system of hosting has been set up. In this system, asylum seekers are allocated to local communities through periodic calls (i.e. with a bottom-up procedure where communities bid for them). This makes it an interesting case, in which local attitudes can be studied as dependent from cultural and political values and economic opportunities. The econometric analysis explores the economic, social and political drivers of such redistribution findings that social capital is negatively related to willingness to host asylum seekers, probably due to the desire to maintain cohesive communities.