War, Coal, and Forced Labor: Assessing the Impact of Prisoner-of-War Employment on Coal Mine Productivity in World War I Germany
Tobias A. Jopp
The Journal of Economic History, 2021, vol. 81, issue 3, 763-791
Abstract:
This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine’s annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW’s productivity averaged 32 percent of the representative regular miner’s productivity and that POWs’ contribution to wartime coal output amounted to 3.9 percent. Violence did not serve as a powerful work incentive.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)
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:cup:jechis:v:81:y:2021:i:3:p:763-791_4
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in The Journal of Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().