Volha Charnysh
This event will take place online and is free and open to the public. To join us, please send an RSVP email to Julius Wilson at jmw2255@columbia.edu, in order to receive access information for the Zoom meeting.
Migration, Diversity, and Economic Development: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe
WWII and its aftermath precipitated the largest episode of forced migration in history. In 1944-51, nearly 20 million people, including 12 million Germans and 5 million Poles, were uprooted from their homes and resettled elsewhere. This unprecedented redistribution of population profoundly diversified societies within states. Migrants coming from different regions, espousing different religious beliefs, and speaking different dialects suddenly shared close quarters with one another. The book asks how they learned to live together and why some uprooted populations are economically better off than others today. Using hand-collected archival and census data from Poland and Germany, I show that the erosion of informal norms and networks in communities where migrants and natives were culturally distant from one another shored up the role of formal state institutions in the provision of public goods and welfare. Greater willingness to engage with state institutions in communities diversified through forced migration contributed to the accumulation of state capacity over time and paid off in the long run: such communities register higher entrepreneurship and personal incomes than more homogeneous counterparts.
Volha Charnysh is an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Networks and Time Workshop Series is part of the Paul F. Lazarsfeld Lecture Series sponsored by INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics).
Knox Hall is located on West 122nd Street between Broadway and Claremont (606 West 122nd Street, New York, NY 10027).
For inquiries about Networks and Time, please contact Eugene Grey (eg2646@columbia.edu) or Seungwon Lee (sl4443@columbia.edu).