Hostility, Population Sorting, and Backwardness: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Red Army after WWII

Christian Ochsner

CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague

Abstract: Does a short episode of conflict or exposure to hostile troops cause regional economic backwardness, and if so, why and how does it persist? I answer these questions by exploiting economic differences across the idiosyncratic and short-lived line of contact between the Red Army and the Western Allies in South Austria at the end of WWII. Spatial regression discontinuity estimates show that hostile presence of the Red Army for 74 days caused an immediate relative population decline of around 12%, amplified to 25% by today. Age-specific migration patterns and subsequent fertility differences explain the multiplying effects. Sector development and measures of local labor productivity in 2011 also lag behind in regions briefly seized by the Red Army, likely driven by skill-specific migration and hampered investment patterns after WWII. The findings provide novel insights into the long-run effects of wars and conflicts, and point to the isolated role of the Red Army’s hostile actions after WWII to understand the European economic East-West divide.

Keywords: Conflict; Hostility; Population shock; Regional development; Red Army (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D74 J13 N44 O14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-tid and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cerge-ei.cz/pdf/wp/Wp768.pdf (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:cer:papers:wp768

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERGE-EI Working Papers from The Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education - Economics Institute, Prague Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucie Vasiljevova ().