Breaking Barriers via Refugees: Cultural Transmission and Women's Economic Empowerment

This paper provides causal evidence on the horizontal transmission of gender norms and their long-term effects on women’s socioeconomic outcomes. We exploit the forced migration of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria to Türkiye after the fall of the Iron Curtain as a natural experiment. Although they shared a common language and religion, ethnic Turkish women from Bulgaria held more progressive gender norms and stronger labor market attachment than native Turkish women. We examine whether their arrival influenced native women’s labor force participation, sector of employment, educational attainment, and fertility over the following decade. Our identification strategy combines a difference-indifferences framework with an instrumental variable approach, using the settlement patterns of earlier refugee waves allocated by the Turkish government through state-led housing and land programs. We find that exposure to refugee women increased native women’s labor force participation , particularly in male-dominated manufacturing sectors where refugee women concentrated, with no corresponding changes among native men. Fertility among native women declined, while middle school completion among native girls rose, bringing their outcomes closer to those of refugee women. These results demonstrate that exposure to progressive gender norms can spur cultural change, reshaping women’s roles both at home and in the workplace. The findings underscore how sustained interaction with migrant groups can shift gender norms and behaviors, even in socially conservative settings with initially low female labor force participation. JEL: J16, J15, J13, N45