The Long-Run Effects of War and Economic Shocks
Paper Session
Sunday, Jan. 3, 2021 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)
- Chair: Rowena Gray, University of California-Merced
Emigration and Long-Run Economic Development: Evidence from the Italian Diaspora to the United States
Abstract
"Does outmigration affect economic development? We study this question in the context of the Italian diaspora between 1875 and 1920, when eight million Italians migrated to the Americas.We assemble a unique dataset at the municipality level, linking local outmigration to a number of indicators of economic development throughout the twentieth century.
Using a strategy similar to a shift-share design, we predict the 1900-1920 emigration rates from each Italian municipality. We do so by combining pre-1900 connections between Italian municipalities and US counties with the differential economic attractiveness of the latter after 1900. Preliminary results indicate that the 1900-1920 mass outmigration had a negative, large, and highly persistent effect on population growth, population density, employment rates, education, and other proxies of economic development.
We also show that outmigration favored the expansion of the agricultural sector, at the expense of manufacturing. We speculate that selective emigration was a key mechanism behind our results."
Discrimination, Migration and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from World War I
Abstract
Are the costs of discrimination mainly borne by the targeted group or by society? This paper examines both individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans living in the U.S. during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we propose a novel measure of local anti-German sentiment based on war casualties. We show that Germans disproportionately fled counties with high casualty rates and that those counties saw more anti-German slurs reported in newspapers. German movers had worse occupational outcomes after the war but also the discriminating communities paid a substantial cost. Counties with larger outflows of Germans, who pre-war tended to be well-trained manufacturing workers, saw a drop in average annual manufacturing wages of 1-7 percent which persisted until 1940. Thus, for discriminating communities, a few years of intense anti-German sentiment were reflected in worse economic outcomes that lasted for more than a decade.Inventing the Endless Frontier: The Effects of the World War II Research Effort on Post-war Innovation
Abstract
During World War II, the U.S. government launched an unprecedented effort to mobilize science for war: the newly-established Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) entered thousands of R&D contracts with industrial and academic contractors, spending one to two orders of magnitude more than what the government was previously investing in science. In this paper, we study the long-run effects of the OSRD-supported research effort on U.S. invention. Using data on all OSRD contracts, we show that these investments had large effects on the direction and location of U.S. invention and high-tech industrial employment, setting in motion agglomeration forces which shaped the technology clusters of the postwar era. Our results demonstrate the effects of a large, mission-driven government R&D program on the growth of domestic technology clusters and long-run technological progress.Discussant(s)
Maggie E.C. Jones
,
University of Victoria
Yannay Spitzer
,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Vicky Fouka
,
Stanford University
Taylor Jaworski
,
University of Colorado Boulder
JEL Classifications
- N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation