Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 12 January 2022 – ZOOM
You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 12 January 2022, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held via Zoom. Jan Nimczik (ESMT Berlin) will be talking about „Long-Run Economic Effects of Immigration in Post-WWII Germany “.
More information can be found here:
Between the end of World War II in 1945 and 1947, millions of people were displaced to what became the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. We examine the effect of their arrival on today’s productivity, wages, income, rents, education levels, and population density at the municipality level. Our identification strategy is based on a well-known spatial discontinuity in the distribution of refugees along the border between the 1945-49 French and US occupation zones in South-West Germany. This discontinuity arose because the US occupation zone admitted refugees while the French zone restricted access. We show that by 1950 this raised population density on the US side of the, by then former, border between the two 1945-49 occupation zones significantly above population density on the French side. The higher population density on the US side of the former border persists in 2020 and coincides with higher rents as well as higher productivity, wages, and education levels. The effects are substantial and point to agglomeration economies that range beyond municipality borders.