Working Papers

Worker Displacement and Labor Market Success: Evidence from Forced Labor Conscription during WWII

Disruptions of labor market trajectories have lasting effects on later economic success. Displacement due to forced labor conscription is a disruption that remains understudied despite its continued prevalence in contemporary contexts. I investigate the consequences of exposure to forced labor conscription for individuals' long-term labor market outcomes. I exploit the fact that cohorts of Dutch civilians faced a differential probability of temporary labor coercion in Nazi Germany during WWII in a Regression Discontinuity Design. Using Dutch census data from 1971, I find that conscripted individuals have lower education, income, and probability of employment. Analyzing heterogeneous effects, I find that exposure to harsher conditions in Germany is associated with reduced labor force participation and poorer health. My findings suggest that the negative impact on labor force participation is mitigated when individuals are conscripted to work in sectors that are also present in the Netherlands, which enhances their ability to reintegrate into the workforce.

Missing Men and Women's Demand for Political Representation
with Barbara Boelmann 

Over the past century, women have gained formal political rights, yet remain under-represented in leadership – partly due to lower demand for representation among women themselves. In this paper, we shift the perspective from why men extended political rights to women toward what shaped women's own demand for representation. Specifically, we study how male absence during World War I affected German women's demand for the franchise, exploiting exogenous variation in drafting intensity across regions for identification. To make demand for political representation directly measurable, we construct a newly digitised panel dataset of the universe of German suffragette clubs – a revealed-preference measure of demand, given the considerable costs of maintaining a club, especially under wartime restrictions on political activism. Our results show that women were more likely to keep suffragette clubs open in counties with greater male absence. This effect is driven by regions where women publicly led war relief efforts, pointing to agency and specifically women's experience in visible leadership roles as the central mechanism. We further show that this demand for representation persisted after the franchise was extended, with women more likely to run for parliament and to vote in counties with greater wartime male absence and a suffragette club.

Work in Progress

Rewriting the Social Contract: Elite Response to Labor Unrest
with Erik Hornung  and Noam Yuchtman  

We study how autocratic elites modify the social contract in response to social unrest. Elites in early 20th-century Prussia were legitimized through unequal voting rights but faced mounting threats of mass mobilization. Using labor strikes as a proxy for mobilization, we find that locations with higher revolutionary pressure witnessed increased spending on redistributive public goods, public bourgeois support for suffrage reform, and parliamentary support for franchise extension – conditional on bourgeois support. This correlational evidence is bolstered with placebo checks and a shift-share instrumental variable approach that relates industry-specific international commodity price changes to Prussian regions based on industry exposure.

Forced Melting Pot: Temporary Migration and the Formation of Economic and Social Ties
with Ann-Kristin Becker

This paper studies whether temporary migration can generate lasting social and economic ties. We examine this question in the context of forced migration in Germany during World War II. We exploit the quasi-random assignment of foreign forced migrants across German counties to estimate whether temporary exposure to migrants shaped subsequent regional ties with migrants' origin countries. We link archival data on the location and nationality of forced migrants to measures of social connectivity, foreign direct investment, and joint patenting between German counties and migrants' origin countries. Using a gravity model, we find that German counties exposed to more migrants from a given origin country developed stronger bilateral social and economic ties with that country after migrants had returned home that persist until today. The effects are more pronounced where wartime conditions were less severe and cultural similarity was larger.