The Long-Run Effects of Immigration: Evidence Across a Barrier to Refugee Settlement

Antonio Ciccone (antonio.ciccone@uni-mannheim.de) and Jan Nimczik (jan.nimczik@esmt.org)

CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany

Abstract: After the end of World War II in 1945, millions of refugees arrived in what in 1949 became the Federal Republic of Germany. We examine their e ect on today's productivity, wages, income, rents, education, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on a spatial discontinuity in refugee settlement at the border between the French and US occupation zones in the South-West of post-war Germany. These occupation zones were established in 1945 and dissolved in 1949. The spatial discontinuity arose because the US zone admitted refugees during the 1945-1949 occupation period whereas the French zone restricted access. By 1950, refugee settlement had raised population density on the former US side of the 1945-1949 border significantly above density on the former French side. Before the war, there never had been significant di erences in population density. The higher density on the former US side persists entirely in 2020 and coincides with higher rents as well as higher productivity, wages, and education levels. We examine whether today's economic di erences across the former border are the result of the di erence in refugee admission; the legacy of other policy di erences between the 1945-1949 occupation zones; or the consequence of socio-economic di erences predating WWII. Taken together, our results indicate that today's economic di erences are the result of agglomeration e ects triggered by the arrival of refugees in the former US zone. We estimate that exposure to the arrival of refugees raised income per capita by around 13% and hourly wages by around 10%.

Keywords: immigration; productivity wages; refugess; long-run effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O11 O4 R11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 74
Date: 2022-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-int, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crctr224.de/research/discussion-papers/archive/dp345 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bon:boncrc:crctr224_2022_345

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series from University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany Kaiserstr. 1, 53113 Bonn , Germany.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CRC Office (crctr224@uni-bonn.de).