Human and Social Capital in Turbulent Times
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM (EST)
- Chair: David Y. Yang, Harvard University
Scholars at Risk: Academic Networks and High-Skilled Emigration from Nazi Germany
Abstract
We study the role of networks in facilitating the escape of persecuted academics from Nazi Germany. From 1933, the Nazi regime started to dismiss academics of Jewish origin from their positions. The timing of dismissals created individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of emigration from Nazi Germany, allowing us to estimate the causal effect of professional networks for emigration decisions. Academics with ties to more colleagues who had emigrated in 1933 or 1934 (early émigrés) were more likely to emigrate. The early émigrés functioned as “bridging nodes” that helped other academics cross over to their destination. We show that for high-skilled migrants’ professional networks matter for migration decisions while community networks do not matter at all. Furthermore, we contribute to the broader literature on networks in economics by providing some of the first empirical evidence of decay in social ties over time. The strength of ties also decays across space, even within cities.The Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War
Abstract
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was one of the most devastating conflicts of the twentieth century, yet little is known about its long-term legacy. We show that the war had a long-lasting effect on social capital, voting behavior and collective memory. To this end we use geo-located data on historical mass graves, disaggregated modern-day survey data on trust, combined with modern electoral results. For econometric identification, we exploit deviations from the initial military plans of attack, using the historical (1931) highway network. We also employ a geographical Regression Discontinuity Design along the Aragon Front. Our results show a significant, negative and sizable relationship between political violence and generalized trust. We further scrutinize the trust results, finding negative effects of conflict on trust in institutions associated with the Civil War, but no effects when looking at trust on Post 1975 democratic institutions. We also find long-lasting results on voting during the Democratic Period (1977-2016), corresponding to the sided political repression implemented in the Aragon region. In terms of mechanisms-using a specialized survey on the Civil War, street names data and Francoist newsreels about the war-we find lower levels of political engagement and differential patterns of collective memory about this traumatic historical event.The Short- and Long-Run Effects of Affirmative Action: Evidence from Imperial China
Abstract
We use a difference-in-differences framework to study the effects of affirmative action policies in the setting of imperial China. Imperial China used an examination system to select government officials. We examine a policy reform in 1712 aimed to lower inequality in access to exams and government jobs. The reform equalized acceptance rates across the provinces, which allowed individuals from underrepresented provinces to pass the exam with lower scores. The reform led to an increase in successful candidates in underrepresented provinces, whose academic and career outcomes also improved over time. We find that such gains were concentrated among individuals in prefectures with the greatest advantage in imperial exams prior to the reform, resulting in growing inequality within the provinces. Divergent trends between prefectures persisted decades into the reform, but were mitigated in prefectures where candidates received travel subsidies.Discussant(s)
David Y. Yang
,
Harvard University
Sascha O. Becker
,
Monash University and University of Warwick
Chicheng Ma
,
University of Hong Kong
JEL Classifications
- N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation
- I2 - Education and Research Institutions