TY - JOUR
T1 - MIGRATION AND KNOWLEDGE DIFFUSION
T2 - THE EFFECT OF RETURNING REFUGEES ON EXPORT PERFORMANCE IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA
AU - Bahar, Dany
AU - Hauptmann, Andreas
AU - Özgüzel, Cem
AU - Rapoport, Hillel
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
PY - 2024/3/19
Y1 - 2024/3/19
N2 - During the early 1990s, Germany offered temporary protection to 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of returning migrants in boosting export performance upon their return. Using confidential German administrative data, we find that industries with 10% more returning refugees exhibit larger exports between the pre-and postwar periods by 1% to 1.6%. We use exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as an instrument to deal with endogeneity concerns. We show evidence pointing to productivity shifts as the main mechanism behind our results. Consistently, we find our results are driven by refugees in occupations more likely to transfer knowledge, technologies, and best practices.
AB - During the early 1990s, Germany offered temporary protection to 700,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of returning migrants in boosting export performance upon their return. Using confidential German administrative data, we find that industries with 10% more returning refugees exhibit larger exports between the pre-and postwar periods by 1% to 1.6%. We use exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as an instrument to deal with endogeneity concerns. We show evidence pointing to productivity shifts as the main mechanism behind our results. Consistently, we find our results are driven by refugees in occupations more likely to transfer knowledge, technologies, and best practices.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85197202952&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1162/rest_a_01165
DO - 10.1162/rest_a_01165
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AN - SCOPUS:85197202952
SN - 0034-6535
VL - 106
SP - 287
EP - 304
JO - Review of Economics and Statistics
JF - Review of Economics and Statistics
IS - 2
ER -
