The paper reviews 59 empirical studies that estimated the economic impact of forced displacement on host communities. A review of the empirical models used by these studies and a meta-analysis of 972 separate results collected from these studies are the main contributions of the paper. Coverage extends to 19 major forced displacement crises that occurred between 1922 and 2018, to host countries at different levels of economic development and different types of forced migrants. Results refer to outcomes related to employment, wages, prices and household well-being. All studies can be classified as ex-post quasi-natural experiments. The analysis on empirical modeling shows a preference for partial equilibrium modeling, differences-in-differences evaluation methods, and cross-section econometrics, with all these choices largely dependent on the type of data available. The meta-analysis finds that most results on employment and wages are non-significant. When significant, decreases in employment and wages are more likely to occur than increases with decreases strongly associated with the short-term, middle-income countries, females, young and informal workers. Food and rent prices tend to increase in the short-term but other prices may decrease. The probability of observing a decrease in household well-being among hosts is lower than 1 in 5.
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