EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Immigration and structural change: Evidence from post-war Germany

Sebastian Braun and Michael Kvasnicka

Journal of International Economics, 2014, vol. 93, issue 2, 253-269

Abstract: Does immigration accelerate sectoral change from low- to high-productivity sectors? This paper analyzes the effect of one of the largest population movements in history, the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II, on Germany's speed of transition away from low-productivity agriculture. A simple two-sector specific factor model, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that expellee inflows boost output per worker by expanding the high-productivity non-agricultural sector but decrease output per worker within sectors. Using German district-level data from before and after the war, we find empirical support for these predictions.

Keywords: Immigration; Sectoral change; Output growth; Post-war Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C36 F22 J61 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022199614000555
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Immigration and Structural Change: Evidence from Post-War Germany (2012) Downloads
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:eee:inecon:v:93:y:2014:i:2:p:253-269

DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2014.03.006

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of International Economics is currently edited by Gourinchas, Pierre-Olivier and Rodríguez-Clare, Andrés

More articles in Journal of International Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:inecon:v:93:y:2014:i:2:p:253-269