Research

Work in Progress

Job Market Paper
Consequences of Forced Labor Conscription: Evidence from Dutch Civilians after WWII

Forced labor remains to be a large issue in today's economy. According to estimates by the International Labour Organization, almost 28 million people were working under some form of coercion in 2021. In this paper, I study the causal effects of facing labor coercion on long-term individual labor market outcomes. I exploit the setting of displaced Dutch civilians who were conscripted by Nazi Germany during WWII based on their birth year and compare individuals born just above the cut-off date to those just below the cut-off date. Using Dutch census data from 1971 and Eurobarometer survey data from 1975 to 1994, I estimate the effects on individuals' later educational attainment, skill level of occupation, and income. I find that there are negative effects on income and skill level of occupation for those individuals who had already started their career in the Netherlands prior to the coercion, while there are no negative effects for those who were drafted right after finishing high school.

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. In early 20th-century Prussia, high levels of mass mobilization threatened elites while unequal voting rights continued to persist. 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. 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.
Results are confirmed when using a shift-share instrument mapping industry-specific changes in international commodity prices to Prussian regions based on their exposure to the industry.

Missing Men and Women's Fight for the Vote
with Barbara Boelmann 

In this paper, we investigate whether power vacuums lead to the empowerment of marginalized groups by analyzing women's empowerment in Germany during World War I. Specifically, we study whether the large share of men missing during the war led to an increase in women's fight for the vote. We exploit exogenous variation in the drafting probability arising from regional differences in recruitment responsibility and link it to the number of local suffragette clubs lobbying for women's right to vote. Our results suggest that women were more likely to found local suffragette clubs when more men were missing during the war. We continue by investigating spillovers of women's empowerment along two dimensions. First, we study whether the empowerment translated into higher political participation once female voting rights were introduced. Second, we use a newly digitized dataset on employment by industry and gender during World War I to investigate whether the increase in demand for political rights is associated with a growing importance of women in the economic sphere.