Immigration and Structural Change: Evidence from Post-war Germany

Michael Kvasnicka Sebastian Braun
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Sebastian Braun () and Michael Kvasnicka

Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy

Abstract: Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration boosts output per worker by expanding the high-productivity sector, but decreases output per worker within a sector. Using German district-level data from before and after the war, we find strong empirical support for these predictions

Keywords: Immigration; sectoral change; output growth; post-war Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J21 C36 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab and nep-mig
Date: 2012-06
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Related works:
Working Paper: Immigration and Structural Change: Evidence from Post-War Germany (2012)
Working Paper: Immigration and Structural Change – Evidence from Post-war Germany (2012)
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kie:kieliw:1778

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