In this paper, we ask whether the main cause of asylum migration, that is, violence in the home country, still affects the life satisfaction of refugees even after they reach a safe country. We combine individual-level survey data on refugees in Germany with country-level data on terror fatalities. The timing of the survey interviews generates exogenous variation in the intensity of recent terror activity in respondents’ countries of origin, which we exploit to assess the effect of terror fatalities on the level of self-reported life satisfaction. Our results indicate that fatalities due to terror activity reduce, on average, the level of life satisfaction reported by refugees. We find that this effect is most substantial for events occurring one or two days before the interview, while older events have no effect. However, we observe an effect of fatalities during the four weeks preceding the interview on persons who have a family member abroad. We show that the group of respondents with a rejected or pending asylum application without legal family reunification options mostly drives this effect.

在本文中，我们询问庇护移民的主要原因，即母国的暴力，是否仍然影响难民在到达安全国家后的生活满意度。我们将德国难民的个人层面调查数据与恐怖死亡人数的国家层面数据相结合。调查访谈的时间会导致受访者原籍国近期恐怖活动强度的外生变化，我们利用这些变化来评估恐怖死亡对自我报告的生活满意度水平的影响。我们的结果表明，恐怖活动造成的死亡人数平均会降低难民报告的生活满意度水平。我们发现，这种影响对于采访前一两天发生的事件最为显着，而较早的事件则没有影响。然而，我们观察到在采访前四个星期内的死亡人数对在国外有家庭成员的人的影响。我们表明，在没有合法家庭团聚选择的情况下，庇护申请被拒绝或待决的受访者群体主要推动了这种影响。