We estimate the push and pull factors involved in the outmigration of Jews facing persecution in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1941. Our empirical investigation makes use of a unique individual-level data set that records the migration history of the Jewish community in Germany over the period. Our analysis highlights new channels, specific to violent contexts, through which social networks affect the decision to flee. We estimate a structural model of migration where individuals base their migration decision on the observation of persecution and migration among their peers. Identification rests on exogenous variations in local push and pull factors across peers who live in different cities of residence. Then we perform various experiments of counterfactual history to quantify how migration restrictions in destination countries affected the fate of Jews. For example, removing work restrictions for refugees in the recipient countries after the Nuremberg Laws (1935) would have led to an increase in Jewish migration out of Germany in the range of 12% to 20% and a reduction in mortality due to prevented deportations in the range of 6% to 10%.

Suárez Serrato and Zidar (2016) identify state corporate tax incidence in a spatial equilibrium model with imperfectly mobile firms. Their identification argument rests on comparative statics omitting a channel implied by their model: the link between common determinants of a location’s attractiveness and the average idiosyncratic productivity of firms choosing that location. This compositional margin causes the labor demand elasticity to be independent from the product demand elasticity, impeding the identification of incidence from the four estimated reduced-form effects. Assigning consensual values to the unidentified parameters, we find that the incidence share borne by firm owners is closer to 25 percent than 40 percent.