SITE Seminar | Refugees and entrepreneurship: Evidence from Ukrainians in Poland

Join us for the next SITE Seminar! On March 31, 2026, we welcome Pierre-Louis Vézina to discuss refugee entrepreneurship in Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, examining firm creation, spillovers to domestic business formation, and underlying mechanisms using registry and survey data.

Start time: 2026-03-31 at 12:00

End time: 2026-03-31 at 13:00

Time zone: CEST

Location: Stockholm School of Economics and online

Working paper title: Refugees and Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Ukrainians in Poland

By: Pierre-Louis Vézina, Cevat Giray Aksoy and Piotr Lewandowski

Abstract

We examine business creation by Ukrainian refugees in Poland following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using registry data, we show that Ukrainians started 38,833 firms in 2022–23, accounting for 7% of all new registrations in Poland. We link this entrepreneurship to refugees in two ways. First, our survey shows that 58% of post-invasion Ukrainian founders registered as refugees. Second, cross-county regressions show that a 10% increase in adult male Ukrainian refugees is associated with a 2.71% increase in Ukrainian firm registrations. We then show that new Ukrainian businesses stimulate rather than crowd out Polish entrepreneurship. Using a shift-share strategy based on refugee shocks and Ukrainians’ comparative advantage, we find that a 10% increase in Ukrainian registrations led to 2.31% more Polish firms. Survey evidence suggests two mechanisms: emulation, with 59% of Ukrainian owners reporting Polish entrepreneurs starting similar firms, and supply-chain linkages, with 88% of Ukrainian firms engaged in local business-to-business transactions.

About the speaker

Pierre-Louis Vézina is Professor of Economics affiliated with the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College London.

Previously he was lecturer at the University of Birmingham and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His research uses natural experiments and novel datasets to get a better grasp of policy issues in trade, development, and migration. He holds a PhD in International Economics from the Geneva Graduate Institute and has been a consultant for the World Bank.

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