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 International Cooperation
with Ann-Kristin Becker

This paper examines the effects of temporary migration on international cooperation. We explore this question within the context of forced migration in Germany during World War II. We exploit the quasi-random distribution of temporary migrants across German counties, which was not determined by prior migration patterns or existing ties. We find that a greater presence of temporary migrants from a given country increases social connectivity as well as the number of firm links and joint patents between German counties and the forced migrants' countries of origin in the post-war period when migrants had returned home. We further show that this effect persists when ties are institutionalized via town twinning. These findings show that even coercive, temporary migration can foster lasting international cooperation when embedded in formal institutions.