The long-term implications of destruction during the Second World War on private wealth in Germany
Publication date
2024-05-17
Document type
Forschungsartikel
Author
Schröder, Carsten
Organisational unit
Publisher
Springer Science+Business Media
Series or journal
Journal of Economic Growth
ISSN
Periodical volume
30
Periodical issue
1
First page
161
Last page
235
Peer-reviewed
✅
Part of the university bibliography
✅
Language
English
Abstract
By the end of the Second World War, an estimated 20% of the West German housing stock had been destroyed. Building on a theoretical life-cycle model, this paper examines the persistent consequences of the war for individual wealth across generations. As our empirical basis, we link a unique historical dataset on the levels of wartime destruction in 1739 West German cities with micro data on individual wealth at the beginning of the twenty-first century from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Among individuals born in cities or villages that were badly damaged during the Second World War, wealth is still about 10% lower today. Similarly, the destruction of parental birthplace has significant negative implications for the wealth of their descendants. These negative implications are robust after controlling for a rich set of pre-war regional and city-level control variables. In complementary empirical exercises, we study potential channels such as inheritances, health, and education, through which the wartime destruction could have affected wealth accumulation across generations.
Description
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Published version
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