The Individual Effects of Socialism – Christoph Schlömer

Speaker

Christoph Schlömer (Kiel Institute)

Abstract

Consider two German families in an East Prussian village on the eve of World War II, sharing the same ancestry, culture, and traditions. After the war, both were expelled: by chance, one reached the British or American occupation zone, the other the Soviet zone, later the socialist GDR. We exploit this episode of forced migration, in which roughly twelve million ethnic Germans were displaced, as a natural experiment to identify the individual-level effects of socialism. Because expellees were homogeneous before displacement and their allocation across zones was driven largely by the chaos of flight, the East-West split approximates quasi-random assignment. Drawing on the German Life History Study, we compare life-cycle outcomes of expellees in East and West. We study labor market outcomes as well as demographic outcomes such as fertility and wealth, and examine how decades of socialism shaped values and beliefs. 

Authors

Sebastian Braun (Kiel Institut) – Christoph Schlömer (Kiel Institut)

Room

Media Room (A-211)