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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 106 No. 2 2024

Migration and Knowledge Diffusion: The Effect of Returning Refugees on Export Performance in the Former Yugoslavia

Dany Bahar1; Andreas Hauptmann2; Cem Özgüzel3; Hillel Rapoport4

1 Brown University, Harvard CID, CESifo, and IZA · 2 Institute for Employment Research · 3 OECD · 4 Paris School of Economics, University of Paris, and Panthéon-Sorbonne

open access

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_01165
Volume
106
Issue
2
Pages
287-304
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex

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