Forced Migration and Human Capital: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers
By Sascha O. Becker, Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer, E. Zhuravskaya. The American Economic Review, 2018
188 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. After World War II, millions of Poles were forcibly uprooted from the Kresy territories of eastern Poland and resettled (primarily) in the newly acquired Western Territories, from which the Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in educational attainment, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today than other Poles. These results are driven by a shift in preferences away from material possessions toward investment in human capital. (JEL I25, I26, J24, N34, R23)
Subfields: Demography, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d753cd2c6e486e09cc9816a8d7f1136b54fa1335
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Citations in the corpus
- Consequences of forced migration: A survey of recent findings (2019, background): “Becker thanks Irena Grosfeld, Pauline Grosjean, Nico Voigtländer and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya for the enjoyable work on our joint paper (Becker et al., 2018) that inspired this survey.”
- Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building (2019, unknown): “Poland, for example, implemented a large-scale resettlement effort post-WWII to populate its newly acquired and depopulated Western Territories from Germany (Becker et al., 2018).”