I would start with the standard labor supply and demand framework, but I would not rely on it exclusively.
Three theoretical approaches seem particularly relevant:
1. Labor supply and factor complementarity: Examines how refugee inflows affect wages and employment depending on whether refugee skills substitute for or complement existing workers.
2. Spatial equilibrium models: Account for regional adjustment, labor mobility, housing constraints, capital investment, and changes in local economic activity.
3. Search and matching models: Help explain employment transitions, skill mismatches, language barriers, and the time required for refugees to integrate into labor markets.
Several useful references are:
* Card (1990), The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market.
* Borjas and Monras (2017), The Labour Market Consequences of Refugee Supply Shocks.
* Brell, Dustmann, and Preston (2020), The Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries.
I would also suggest considering Productive Value–Productive Power (PV-PP), a mathematical framework I’ve developed for analyzing productive systems.
Traditional labor-market models focus primarily on employment, wages, and economic adjustment. PV-PP offers a complementary perspective: how does a refugee influx change the productive capacity of both the incoming population and the host economy over time?
Refugees bring knowledge, skills, and potential productive capabilities, but realizing that capacity depends on language, institutional access, credential recognition, complementary resources, and available opportunities.
The framework distinguishes immediate economic exchanges from changes in longer-term productive capacity. It also examines whether interactions build, preserve, constrain, or deplete that capacity.
I would use conventional labor economics for causal estimation and consider PV-PP as an additional framework for analyzing longer-term capacity development and economic integration. Its usefulness for this specific application would still need empirical validation.
Framework overview:
https://amundsenlance.github.io/pvpp-framework/