The Strategic Bombing of German Cities During World War Ii and its Impact on City Growth

By S. Brakman, H. Garretsen, Marc Schramm. Social Science Research Network, 2004

450 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct a unique data set to analyze whether or not a large temporary shock had an impact on German city growth and city size distribution. Following recent work by Davis and Weinstein (2001) on Japan, we take the strategic bombing of German cities during WWII as our example of such a shock. The goal of this paper is to analyze the impact of this shock on German city-growth and the resulting city-size distribution. If city-growth follows a random walk this would imply that the war shock had a permanent impact on German city-growth. If, however, as a second group of theories predicts, the random walk hypothesis is not confirmed this would mean that the war shock at most had a temporary effect on the city growth process. Our main finding is that city growth in western Germany did not follow a random walk, while city growth in eastern Germany did follow a random walk. Different post-war economic systems are most likely responsible for this outcome.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b3995a7f57990fd8537fdf406f7be0ee2981b9f9

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. H. Garretsen
2. Marc Schramm
3. S. Brakman
4. E. M. Bosker
5. John Bellows
6. Rubiana M. Chamarbagwala
7. Hilcías E. Morán
8. Edward Miguel

Citations in the corpus

• The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam (2006, unknown): “In related work, Davis and Weinstein (2002) show that the U.S. bombing of major Japanese cities during World War II had no long run impact on the population of those cities relative to prewar levels, and Brakman et al. (2004) find a similar result for postwar Germany.”
• The human capital consequences of civil war: Evidence from Guatemala (2011, background): “Cities that experienced heavy bombing during World War II were indistinguishable from those that were not bombed 20 to 25 years after the war in Japan (Davis and Weinstein, 2002) and in Germany (Brakman et al., 2004).”
• A Century of Shocks: The Evolution of the German City Size Distribution 1925-1999 (2008, unknown): “Having found compelling evidence on the irrelevance of randomcity growth as an explanation of the evolution of theGermanurban system, the next section, building on earlier work by Davis and Weinstein (2002) and Brakman et al.”
• The Economic Impact of Social Ties: Evidence from German Reunification* (2011, unknown): “At the aggregate level, Brakman, Garretsen, and Schramm (2004) find that the pattern of wartime destruction had no long-run impact on city growth in West Germany.”
• War and local collective action in Sierra Leone (2009, background): “Studies that focus on United States bombing – including in Japan (Davis and Weinstein 2002), Germany (Brakman et al., 2004) and Vietnam (Miguel and Roland 2005) – find few if any persistent impacts of the bombing on local population or economic performance.”