Immigration and the Diffusion of Technology: The Huguenot Diaspora in Prussia

By E. Hornung. Migrationsforschung – interdisziplinär & diskursiv, 2020

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivity for the Huguenots migration to Prussia. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from 1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in a unique data base. In 1685, religious persecution drove highly skilled Huguenots out of France into backward Brandenburg-Prussia where they were channeled into towns to compensate population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years’ War. Exploiting this settlement pattern in an instrumental-variable approach, we still find causal effects of Huguenot settlement on the productivity of textile manufactories hundred years after their immigration.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77ef424b25c008cfc11c671a75c927baff3275aa

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Citations in the corpus

Immigrants and the Making of America (2019, background): “For example, the State University system was modelled after the Prussian system (Faust, 1916, pp. 10– 11).”
The impact of forced displacement on host communities: A review of the empirical literature in economics (2019, background): “…supply and creating a demand stimulus on consumer markets, refugees can also have an impact on productivity and structural change (Paserman 2013; Hornung 2014; Braun and Kvasnicka 2014; Savimaki 2011; Peters 2017), innovation and new patents (Moser, Voena, and Waldinger 2014), create new…”
Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent findings (2019, background): “manufactories, as shown by Hornung (2014). These skilled workers not only brought knowledge or technology with them.”
The Mission: Human Capital Transmission, Economic Persistence, and Culture in South America* (2018, background): “Hornung, E. (2014). Immigration and the di usion of technology: The Huguenot diaspora in Prussia. American Economic Review, 104.1, 84-122. Huillery, E. (2009). History matters: The long-term impact of colonial public investments in French West Africa. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1.”