EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Migration and Knowledge Diffusion: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia

Dany Bahar, Andreas Hauptmann, Cem Ozguzel and Hillel Rapoport ()

PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL

Abstract: During the early 1990s Germany offered temporary protection to 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of returning migrants in boosting export performance upon their return. Using confidential German administrative data we find that industries with 10% more returning refugees exhibit larger exports between the pre- and post-war periods by 1 to 1.6%. We use exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as an instrument to deal with endogeneity concerns. We show evidence pointing to productivity shifts as the main mechanism behind our results. Consistently, we find our results are driven by refugees in occupations more apt to transfer knowledge, technologies and best-practices.

Keywords: Migration; Refugees; Knowledge diffusion; Management; Exports; Productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published in Review of Economics and Statistics, 2024, 106 (2), pp.287-304. ⟨10.1162/rest_a_01165⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Migration and Knowledge Diffusion: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia (2024) Downloads
Working Paper: Migration and Knowledge Diffusion: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia (2024)
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:hal:pseptp:halshs-03957218

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01165

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Caroline Bauer ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-03957218