Enduring Legacies of Forced Migration: Refugees and Health Behavior in 21st - Century Greece

This paper investigates the long-term impact of the 1920s forced displacement of Asia Minor refugees on contemporary health behaviors in Greece. Using regionally representative data from the 2019 Greek Health Survey and historical refugee settlement patterns, we find that individuals living in areas with higher historical shares of refugees are significantly more likely to engage in preventive health care, consult medical professionals, participate in physical activity, and maintain healthy dietary habits. These effects persist after controlling for socioeconomic, demographic, and geographic factors, and are robust to various specifications, including the exclusion of Attica, the main internal migration hub, and age-stratified analyses. To explain these findings, we discuss four plausible mechanisms: the relatively higher human capital and educational attainment of the refugee population, their early exposure to adverse health conditions, large-scale public infrastructure investments prompted by the resettlement effort, and the cultural diffusion of health-conscious norms and practices. Together, our results suggest that historical episodes of forced migration can have durable effects on public health behavior through intergenerational transmission of norms and institutional legacies, with implications for both migration policy and health inequality.