War Reparations, Structural Change, and Intergenerational Mobility*

Matti Mitrunen

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2025, vol. 140, issue 1, 521-584

Abstract: From 1944 to 1952, largely agrarian Finland had to export, on average, 4% of its yearly GDP in industrial products to the Soviet Union as war reparations. To meet the reparation demands, the Finnish state needed to provide extensive temporary support to Soviet-assigned industries with insufficient production capacity. This article documents the long-term effects of this extensive and temporary industrial policy on industrial and local development and on individual outcomes. Using newly digitized data sets, I show in a difference-in-differences setup that the short-term nonmarket production persistently and significantly increased the employment and production of the manufacturing industries exposed to the policy. These industries plausibly benefited from large initial investments and exposure to export markets associated with the war reparations. The episode further led to local development and structural change, as the more exposed regions became persistently more industrialized. I substantiate these within-Finland results with triple-difference setups using comparable Norwegian data. I use Finnish administrative data to study the long-term individual effects of the episode. Tracking individuals over 30 years, I show that the initial state investments and the persistent change in the local industrial structure increased long-term incomes, led to more educational attainment, and promoted the upward mobility of children and young adults in the more exposed regions before the war reparations period. The observed effects are driven by the more advanced heavy industry, which received the majority of state assistance.

Date: 2025
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