Eventi del

28 2018 12:30
Sala riunioni 5.e4.sro4 - Via Roentgen, 1

Development Labor Political Economy - DLPE

Forced Migration and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from Post-WWII Population Transfers

 Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (Paris School of Economics)

Abstract

We exploit a unique historical setting to study the long-run effects of forced migration on investment in education. As a result of World War II, the Polish borders were redrawn, resulting in large-scale migration. Poles were forced to move from the Kresy territories in the East (taken over by the USSR) and were resettled mostly to the newly acquired Western Territories, from which Germans were expelled. We combine historical censuses with newly collected survey data to show that Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today, while there were no pre-WWII differences in education. This result holds when we restrict ancestral locations to a subsample around the former Kresy border, and when including fixed effects for the destination of migrants. The historical setting also allows us to narrow the comparison to forced migrants vs. voluntary migrants. The latter arrived from Central Poland, attracted by government programs to settle the largely emptied Western Territories. We find that -- even within municipalities -- descendants of forced migrants are more educated than the descendants of voluntary migrants. This difference is not driven by the selection of either group of migrants or by pre-war differences. Instead, survey evidence suggests that forced migration led to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in mobile assets such as human capital. The effects persist over three generations.