Missing Men: World War II Casualties and Structural Change

Christoph Eder

Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck

Abstract: A shock to the sector composition of the local labor market can affect long-run economic development of a location. Because structural change ultimately shifts labor from agriculture to services, an early transition to manufacturing may hamper long-run prosperity. The identification strategy exploits military World War II (WWII) casualties in Austrian municipalities as an exogenous shock to the local labor market. WWII casualties shifted labor out of agriculture into manufacturing in the short-run, which eventually led to a differential path of structural change. In the long-run, I find a strong and robust negative effect of WWII casualties on subsequent economic output.

Keywords: structural change; local labor markets; spatial equilibrium; World War II; Austria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J40 N14 O14 R11 R12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2016-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-geo, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.uibk.ac.at/downloads/c4041030/wpaper/2016-22.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Missing Men:World War II Casualties and Structural Change (2016)
Working Paper: Missing Men: World War II Casualties and Structural Change (2014)
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:inn:wpaper:2016-22

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Faculty of Economics and Statistics, Universität Innsbruck Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Judith Courian ().