War, Coal, and Forced Labor: Assessing the Impact of Prisoner-of-War Employment on Coal Mine Productivity in World War I Germany

This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of economic history 2021-09, Vol.81 (3), p.763-791
Main Author: Jopp, Tobias A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
20th century
Coal
Coal mining
Economic history
Employment
Forced labor
Labor productivity
Manual workers
Mines
Prisoners of war & missing in action
World War I
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper assesses the causal relationship between POW assignments and labor productivity for a vital sector of the German World War I economy, namely coal mining. Prisoners of war (POWs) provided significant labor. Combining data on all Ruhr mines with a treatment-effects approach, I find that POW employment alone accounted for 36 percent of the average POW-employing mine’s annual productivity decline over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW’s productivity averaged 32 percent of the representative regular miner’s productivity and that POWs’ contribution to wartime coal output amounted to 3.9 percent. Violence did not serve as a powerful work incentive.
ISSN:0022-0507
1471-6372
DOI:10.1017/S0022050721000310