Losing height: measuring the regional loss of human capital from the Republican exile to Mexico

Blanca Sanchez Alonso and Carlos Santiago Caballero
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Carlos Santiago-Caballero

IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola

Abstract: Recent studies showed that Spanish republican exiles who travelled to Mexico to escape the effects and aftermath of the Spanish civil war were positively selected. However, the potential existence of regional differences in this positive selection needs to be addressed appropriately. Using a new dataset directly extracted from primary sources, we compare the heights of the republican exiles in Mexico with the estimations of those who stayed behind in their provinces of origin. We also study the existence of potential determinants to explain these differences. In addition to estimating how intense the loss of human capital was at the regional level, we also compare the heights of the republican exiles in Mexico with the heights of the Mexican population. Our results show significant regional differences in the positive selection of republican exiles. This was probably the consequence of the opportunities the local populations had to escape after the war started. We also show that Mexico was a place where Spanish migrants were able to obtain better occupations than their counterparts in Spain, meaning that although Mexico benefited from the arrival of a highly skilled labour force, it also provided republican exiles new opportunities.

Keywords: Heights; Exile; Gender; War (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D6 J24 N0 N33 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://e-archivo.uc3m.es/rest/api/core/bitstreams ... d056bc6f098c/content (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:cte:whrepe:36345

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IFCS - Working Papers in Economic History.WH from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Instituto Figuerola
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Ana Poveda ().