The next RITM Economics Seminar will be held on Tuesday, March 11th from 12h15 to 13h15, in room Gaudemet (Sceaux).
Tobias Korn (Leibniz University Hannover) will present his paper “Structural Transformation during War: Evidence from Germany”.
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Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of World War I casualties on structural transformation in Weimar Germany. We newly geocode the birthplaces of 8.5 million wounded and killed German soldiers, and link these data to German county-level census data before and after WWI. Our main results are based on Continuous Difference-in-Differences estimations and show that counties with a higher human loss fell behind adopting a modern factory system. We trace this effect to a shortage of hard-to-replace white collar workers, especially in the crucial tertiary sector. Our study contributes to the understanding of the economic consequences of war during critical periods of economic transformation.
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Link to the RITM Economics seminar web page