The Second World War, Inequality and the Social Contract in Britain

Leander Heldring, James Robinson and Parker J. Whitfill

No 29677, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: What is the impact of warfare on inequality and the social contract? Using local data on bombing, the evolution of wealth inequality and vote shares for the Labour Party in Britain around World War II we establish two results. First, on average, we find no impact of bombing on inequality. However, there is considerable heterogeneity and this result is driven by the southern Britain. In northern Britain bombing led to significant falls in inequality. Second, heavier bombing led to a significant increase in the vote share for Labour after the War everywhere, but this effect is transitory in the south while it is permanent in the north. Our results obtain both in a simple difference-in-differences framework as well as in a panel-regression discontinuity framework in which we exploit the limited range of German fighter escort planes. Our results provide novel causal evidence for the inequality reducing impact of warfare and we interpret them as consistent with the notion that the impact of the War also led to a reconfiguration of the social contract in Britain.

JEL-codes: D3 H5 N4 O52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
Note: POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Leander Heldring & James A. Robinson & Parker Whitfill, 2022. "The Second World War, Inequality and the Social Contract in Britain," Economica, vol 89(S1).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29677.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:nbr:nberwo:29677

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29677

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().