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  5. Famine and Wars: Destruction and Reconstruction of 20th Century Europe
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Famine and Wars: Destruction and Reconstruction of 20th Century Europe

Paper Session

Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)

Convention Center, 221A
Hosted By: American Economic Association
  • Chair: Michela Giorcelli, University of California-Los Angeles

The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932-33

Andrei Markevich
,
University of Helsinki and CEPR
Naumenko Natalya
,
George Mason University
Nancy Qian
,
Northwestern University

Abstract

We study the Ukrainian famine during 1932-33 and document that: i)Ukraine produced enough food in 1932 to avoid famine; ii)mortality was increasing in the pre-famine ethnic Ukrainian population share and unrelated to food productivity; iii)this pattern exists across the entire Soviet Union; iv)the pattern was similar at different administrative levels; v)migration restrictions exacerbated mortality; vi)grain procurement were increasing, while grain retention decreasing in the ethnic Ukrainian population share across regions. Anti-Ukrainian bias in Soviet policy explains up to 92% of famine mortality in Ukraine; approximately half of the total effect comes from bias in the centrally planned food procurement policy.

The Economics of Civilian Victimization: Evidence from World War II Italy

Nicola Fontana
,
Trinity College Dublin
Michela Giorcelli
,
University of California-Los Angeles
Marco Tabellini
,
Harvard Business School

Abstract

To what extent does variation in the cost of misbehavior - namely soldiers’ accountability - impact the frequency and severity of civilian victimization in armed conflicts? To answer this question, we study civilian killings by Axis soldiers during the Italian Campaign in World War II (July 1943 - May 1945). The German command attempted to contain indiscriminate violence against civilians for strate- gic reasons, but plausibly exogenous variation in the movement of front lines negatively shocked its enforcement capacity, thus reducing soldiers’ accountability. In a stacked difference-in-differences es- timation, we compare Axis troops’ behavior in treated municipalities that fell into the combat zone at frontline activation, with that of troops in comparison municipalities that remained either inside or out- side the combat zone. We find that the activation of a new frontline increased indiscriminate violence, such as collective killings, murders unrelated to partisan attacks and against vulnerable population, by 10 folds. The effect is concentrated in municipalities located away from divisions’ headquarters (where the German command’s enforcement capacity was, at baseline, weaker) and where bombing and parti- san presence were less intense (where Axis troops were safer), which provides further evidence in favor of an accountability mechanism. Crucially for policy, soldiers from less experienced units were more likely to change their behavior in response to a drop in accountability.

The Long Shadow of the Spanish Civil War

Ana Tur-Prats
,
University of California-Merced
Felipe Valencia Caicedo
,
Vancouver School of Economics, CEPR and IZA

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. We use geo-located data on historical mass graves and disaggregated modern-day survey data on trust, combined with modern electoral results. We find a negative and sizable relationship between political violence and trust. We further scrutinize the trust results, finding negative effects of conflict on trust in institutions associated with the Civil War, but no effects on Post 1975 democratic institutions.

Discussant(s)
Leander Heldring
,
Northwestern University
Philine Widmer
,
ETH Zurich
Patrick A. Testa
,
Tulane University
JEL Classifications
  • N4 - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation