The Employment Effects of Immigration: Evidence from the Mass Arrival of German Expellees in Postwar Germany

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Leibniz Association; Institut fur Weltwirtschaft an der Universitat Kiel (IFW)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050714000035
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 69-108
• 关键词: labor-market impacts; wages

摘要

This article studies the employment effects of one of the largest forced population movements in history, the influx of millions of German expellees to West Germany after World War II. This episode of forced mass migration provides a unique setting to study the causal effects of immigration. Expellees were not selected on the basis of skills or labor market prospects and, as ethnic Germans, were close substitutes to native West Germans. Expellee inflows substantially reduced native employment. The displacement effect was, however, highly nonlinear and limited to labor market segments with very high inflow rates.