Research notes · Migration

How long does a labour market take to absorb a very large, sudden arrival?

What the authors found

Braun and Weber study the arrival of eight million German expellees in West Germany after 1945, distributed very unevenly between regions. Fitting a dynamic equilibrium model to two decades of regional data, they find unemployment differentials and internal migration rates rose sharply and then declined only gradually over the following decade. The adjustment was slow enough to impose measurable lifetime income losses on native workers even though the long-run equilibrium was restored.

What our data adds

The contemporary event of comparable scale is in this database. Ukraine records net migration of 1,702,358 in the most recent year — a return flow following the displacement of more than seven million people in 2022. If the post-war German adjustment took a decade with a far larger inflow relative to population, the European labour markets that received Ukrainian refugees are early in a process rather than past it, and figures gathered two or three years after an arrival are measuring the transition rather than the outcome.

What this cannot show

The comparison is offered for scale and nothing more: post-war West Germany received expellees who were ethnic Germans with full citizenship into a devastated economy under reconstruction, which resembles the present case in almost no respect that matters for labour market adjustment. Our annual national series cannot see the regional variation the paper's identification rests on, and holds no unemployment data at all.

The data behind it

Related notes

• If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
• When seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?
• If firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?

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