Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
This paper uncovers the long-term consequences of warfare on resilience. I exploit a quasi-experimental setting, using variation in WWII destruction in West German cities and variation in exposure to the war. I use data from the German Municipality Statistical Yearbooks of 1949 and combine it with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Employing a difference-in-differences estimation, I find that exposure to greater war intensity during birth, childhood or young adulthood increases the resilience of individuals when they grow older. Cohort analysis shows that older generations were especially sensitive to the shock. In addition, I perform mediation analysis to test different instrumental mechanisms, such as income, employment or education. The findings are robust to sample selection, falsification tests and validity checks. Furthermore, focusing only on observations closer to the threshold and later using a donut difference-in-differences, I reject that the main result is due to the potential negative effect of destroyed institutions on those born after the war.
Video from the STATEC Measuring Progress Workshop (2-3 June, 2023)
We use European Social Survey data to disentangle the ‘inherited’ and the ‘contextual’ components of resilience, following the approaches taken in Alesina and Giuliano (2010) and Luttmer and Singhal (2011). We suggest that the inherited part of resilience reflects culture in the country of birth, while the contextual part captures both institutions and culture in the country where the individual currently resides. We separately identify these two components via a sample of immigrants, for whom the birth and residence countries differ. We find that resilience is both inherited and contextual, with the latter component being the most important. The ‘inherited’ component of resilience is larger for men and those who do not have citizenship in their residence country, and the ‘contextual’ component is greater for those who come from an EU member state. We last present some evidence from second-generation immigrants of the intergenerational transmission of inherited cultural resilience.
This paper establishes how individual resilience changed following economic and health shocks during the COVID-19 pandemic using COME-HERE panel data covering five European countries. We consider both the incidence and intensity of these shocks. We test two existing groups of models. Those on Post-Traumatic Growth expect an increase in resilience after a certain period of time passed since a shock occurred. Alternatively, Graham and Oswald (2010) predicts decreased resilience after adversity. Our findings support the latter, the experience of at least one negative shock (job loss, a drop in household income, isolation, or the diagnosis of a mental disorder) during the pandemic reduces future resilience.
Ferrer-i-Carbonell, A., & Riera Mallol, G. (2021). “Impacte de la Covid-19 sobre el benestar als Països Catalans. Una comparativa europea”. In Cambra Oficial de Comerç, Indústria, Serveis i Navegació de Barcelona (Eds.), Memòria econòmica de Catalunya 2020. Barcelona: Cambra Oficial de Comerç, Indústria, Serveis i Navegació de Barcelona. ISSN 2444-7978
Riera, G., & Sierra, J. (2018). “Complience”. In Koszewski, R., & Zalcewicz, A. (Eds.) Report on selected solutions of law, business and technologies preventing crimes. Warsaw: Institute of Justice Publishing House. ISBN 978-83-907141-7-2