The Societal Costs of Economic Decline

在这个项目中，我们将分析民粹主义在东德国的显著兴起是否与柏林围墙倒塌后该国遭受的经济动荡有关。各种当代的说法都认为，这场意想不到的长期经济衰退导致了东德公民的疏忽、沮丧和经济不安全感，最终成为今天民粹主义言论的沃土。我们将把这些主张，以严格的实证检验，从统一之前和之后，以及国家的最先进的识别策略，以及利用细粒度的区域数据。为此，我们将首先联合收割机和协调各种行政数据来源的地方就业和经济活动，从两个时代的德意志民主共和国和统一后的德国。然后，我们将利用这个数据集调查（决定因素）的地区差异，在经济衰退后，德国的统一。我们假设，“统一的经济冲击”的程度在东德各地区之间存在很大差异，因为在社会主义政权时期，东德各地区的工业构成不同，而且一些东德工业几乎达到了西德的生产率标准，而另一些则明显没有生产力。为了检验这一假设，我们将利用现有的工业水平的东西部生产率差距的措施，为20世纪80年代末，并计算每个东德自治市的隐含生产率差距，其前统一的工业就业构成。然后，我们将把这种衡量当地生产力的方法与统一后市政当局就业的演变联系起来。在拟议项目的最后一部分，我们最终将把20世纪90年代初统一对地方经济的冲击程度与2010年代的地方投票行为联系起来。然而，这种关系的简单相关性很可能是有偏差的-例如，由于政治偏好的持续区域差异，同时随时间变化的政策差异，或统一后的内生经济发展。为了建立因果关系，我们将实施一个工具变量策略，使我们能够隔离观察到的地方统一后就业冲击，这仅仅是由于当地的生产力差异统一之前的外源成分。

In this project, we will analyze whether the notable rise of populism in East Germany can be linked to the economic turmoil that hit the country in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Various contemporary accounts have argued that this unexpected and long-lasting economic downturn caused sentiments of negligence, frustration, and economic insecurity among East German citizens that ultimately served as fertile ground for today’s populist rhetoric. We will put these claims to a rigorous empirical test by drawing upon fine-grained regional data from both before and after reunification as well as state-of-the-art identification strategies. To this end, we will first combine and harmonize various administrative data sources on local employment and economic activity from both the times of the German Democratic Republic and post-reunification Germany. We will then draw upon this dataset to investigate (determinants of) regional differences in the economic downturn that followed Germany’s reunification. We hypothesize that the extent of the ``economic shock of reunification’’ differed substantially across East German regions because of their differential industrial composition during the times of the socialist regime, and the fact that some Eastern industries almost met the West German productivity standard while others were remarkably unproductive. To test this hypothesis, we will draw upon existing industry-level measures of the East-West productivity gap for the late 1980s and calculate for each East German municipality its implied productivity gap to the West, subject to its pre-reunification composition of industrial employment. We will then relate this measure of local productivity to municipalities’ evolution of employment post reunification. In the final part of the proposed project, we will eventually link the extent of the local economic shock of reunification in the early 1990s to local voting behavior in the 2010s. However, simple correlations of this relationship are most likely biased – e.g., due to persistent regional differences in political preferences, concurrent time-varying policy differences, or endogenous economic development post reunification. To establish causal effects, we will therefore implement an instrumental variables strategy that will allow us to isolate the exogenous component in the observed local post-reunification employment shocks that is merely due to local productivity differentials prior to reunification.