Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1778:
Immigration and Structural Change: Evidence from Post-war Germany
Michael Kvasnicka Sebastian Braun
Abstract: Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards
high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic
Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural
experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the
economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be
equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration boosts output per
worker by expanding the high-productivity sector, but decreases output per
worker within a sector. Using German district-level data from before and
after the war, we find strong empirical support for these predictions
Keywords: Immigration, sectoral change, output growth, post-war Germany; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: J61,; J21,; C36,; N34; (follow links to similar papers)
39 pages, June 2012
Before downloading any of the electronic versions below
you should read our statement on
copyright.
Download GhostScript
for viewing Postscript files and the
Acrobat Reader for viewing and printing pdf files.
Downloadable files:
KWP%201778.pdf
Download Statistics
Report other problems with accessing this service to Sune Karlsson ()
or Helena Lundin ().
Programing by
Design Joakim Ekebom