12/05/2026

Gabriel Bruester

Researcher

"The Narrow Cultural Footprint of a Labor-Supply Shock"

Abstract

This paper exploits the post-WWII expellee inflow into the German state of Baden-Württemberg as a natural-experiment to test whether a transient labor-supply shock leaves a cultural legacy in female labor force participation. The French occupation zone restricted entry while the US zone absorbed 12 percentage points more expellees as a share of population. A spatial RDD reveals that the shock operated through an agricultural labor-pull margin: where male labor saturated, women were drawn into agriculture; expellee inflows relieved this margin on the US side, generating a 14.7 pp cross-zone gap in female agricultural employment in 1950. Structural transformation eliminates the channel by 1970 and modern FLFP (2001-2023) does no longer differ between the former zones. Across multiple gender norms in the 1990 European Values Study, only the belief directly tied to the affected behavior — that a working mother can have a warm relation with her children — survives the fading of the agricultural sector and the subsequent exit of women from the labor force.

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