Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers

Abstract

The version presented here is a Working Paper (or 'pre-print') that may be later published elsewhere.

The Persistent Legacy of the Fallen Empires. Assessing the Effects of Poland's Historical Partitions on Contemporary Social Norms Regarding Education

“…The poor performance of students in the new (post-German) territories in the west and north of Poland is noted in most of the existing studies. In this context, a recent work by Becker et al (2018) has yielded findings which at first glance may look surprising -namely, in showing that descendants of the forced migrants (who account for almost 30% of the population in the acquired areas) tend to have on average one extra year of schooling and are driven by a higher propensity to finish secondary and higher education. However, as shown by the authors, this advantage is likely to be offset by the very low educational attainment of the autochthonous population, and therefore the findings of Becker et al are not in contradiction with the earlier studies on the geography of educational achievements in Poland.…”

Do Risk Preferences Change? Evidence from the Great East Japan Earthquake

“…As the intensity of an earthquake depends not only on distance from the epicenter but subsurface structure, there are reasonable variations in intensity measure, even within the same distance from the epicenter. 8 Of Japan's 1,724 municipalities as of April 1, 2011, the survey covers 227 municipalities (as described in Subsection IB), which are shown with black outlines in Figure 1. The figure shows that our survey data cover throughout Japan, and thus, there is considerable variation in intensity level among our surveyed municipalities.…”

“…Torche (2011) uses seismic intensity as a proxy for maternal stress to study the effects of stress on birth outcomes 8. The correlation between the distance from the epicenter of the Earthquake and our seismic intensity measure at the municipality level is −0.896 (N = 227) in all locations, −0.662 (N = 79) in locations with intensity of 4 and higher, and −0.835 (N = 148) in locations with intensity lower than 4.…”

Persistence Despite Revolutions

“…Acemoglu et al (2011) document that the Holocaust and the disruption of social structure that it entailed led to long-term decline in local social, economic, and political conditions, which suggests a negative effect of mass murder on the remaining community. The affected group themselves, on the other hand, could partially recover from the negative shock: Ager et al (2019) show that the white southern households that lost substantial slave assets after the U.S. Civil War had recovered in income and wealth by 1880; and Becker et al (2020) demonstrate that forced migrants from eastern Poland after the Second World War invested more heavily in human capital in subsequent generations, a behavior that the authors explain by preferences shifting away from physical, material possessions. In a context more directly related to our study, Chen et al (2015) find that urban dwellers in China exhibit high mobility in terms of educational attainment among the generation that grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and low mobility (i.e., high persistence) for the cohorts that grew up after the Revolution; Xie and Zhang 2019show that the grandchildren of the pre-Land Reform elites attained more education.…”