Discrimination, Migration, and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from World War I

Abstract

as well as seminar participants at Free University Berlin, Southern Denmark, and Pittsburgh for helpful discussions and comments. This paper was written as part of Ferrara's PhD thesis which received valuable feedback from his advisers, seminar participants at the University of Warwick, as well as the thesis examiners Bishnupriya Gupta and Taylor Jaworski. We also thank Mike Matheis who kindly shared his manufacturing data with us.

Asian Discrimination in the Coronavirus Era: Implications for Business Formation and Survival

“…Hence, the onset of the epidemic constitutes an exogenous change in prejudice against Asians that allows for unequivocally testing, in our case, the labor market implications of taste-based discrimination in a similar vein to prior studies examining discrimination against Arab men after 9/11 (i.e. Kaushal et al, 2007;Wang, 2016) or against Germans in the United States during World War II (Ferrara and Fishback, 2020).…”

“…Germans after World War II (Ferrara and Fishback, 2020), or gay men during the HIV/AIDS epidemic (Herek and Glunt, 1988;Herek and Capitanio, 1993). Our study adds to this literature by documenting the impact of emerging discriminatory behaviors against Asians after the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…Finally, we might expect anti-Asian sentiments to be stronger in areas where the virus has proven more deadly (Ferrara and Fishback, 2020).…”

Forced displacement in history: Some recent research

“…There are intermediate cases where there is a strong force pushing towards migration, but it is not forced in the sense of being inescapable. Ferrara and Fishback (2020) document the self‐harm inflicted on US counties that ‘discriminated away’ their German population as a result of anti‐German sentiment during WWI. US counties from which Germans felt forced to move away, had significantly lower manufacturing wages afterwards.…”

“…In some cases, those are individual‐level data (e.g., Becker, Lindenthal, et al, 2021; Buggle et al, 2020). Other papers work with both county‐level and individual‐level census data to study the effect of forced migration at both the individual and aggregate level (e.g., Ferrara & Fishback, 2020). Another novelty is the use of large‐scale surveys to study the long‐run consequences of forced migration on subsequent generations via questions that explicitly trace the ancestral locations of residence of the survey respondents (e.g., Becker, Grosfeld, et al, 2020).…”