Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 7 July 2021
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 7 July 2021 at 13:15. The seminar will be held via Zoom. Felipe Carozzi (London School of Economics) will be talking about “Scars of War: the local legacy of sacrifice across generations of British Soldiers”.
Please find below the abstract:
We study the local legacy of the WW1 mortality shock and its effects on British soldiers’ behaviour in WW2. Using parish-level data, we show that localities suffering more losses in WW1 also experienced more deaths in WW2. For identification, we rely on instrumenting WW1 deaths with predicted deaths constructed aggregating regiment-level mortality rates. We then turn to individual level data from military records to show that WW2 soldiers born in hard-hit parishes are more likely to die earlier and to be awarded a gallantry honour. These effects are larger in parishes that have built a listed memorial, suggesting that the remembrance and commemoration of fallen soldiers prompts recruits to fight more aggressively and take additional risks in the battlefield.