Ifo Institute Immigration and the Diffusion of Technology: The Huguenot Diaspora in Prussia Erik Hornung Ifo Working Paper No. 114 November 2011 An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded from the Ifo website www.cesifo-group.de. Ifo Working Paper No. 114 Immigration and the Diffusion of Technology: The Huguenot Diaspora in Prussia* Abstract This paper analyzes long-term effects of skilled-worker immigration on productivity for the Huguenots migration to Prussia. We combine Huguenot immigration lists from 1700 with Prussian firm-level data on the value of inputs and outputs in 1802 in a unique data base. In 1685, religious persecution drove highly skilled Huguenots out of France into backward Brandenburg-Prussia where they were channeled into towns to compensate population losses due to plagues during the Thirty Years’ War. Exploiting this settlement pattern in an instrumental-variable approach, we still find causal effects of Huguenot settlement on the productivity of textile manufactories hundred years after their immigration. JEL Classification: N33, J24, O33, F22. Keywords: Migration, technological diffusion, human capital, Huguenots, Prussian economic history Erik Hornung Ifo Institute Poschingerstr. 5 81679 Munich, Germany Phone: +49(0)89/9224-1272
[email protected] * Comments from Sascha O. Becker, Davide Cantoni, Francesco Cinnirella, William Collins, Oliver Falck, Guido Schwerdt, Ludger Woessmann and seminar participants at Ifo Munich and the annual meetings of the European Society for Population Economics 2010, the German Economic Association 2010, the Spring Meeting of Young Economists 2010 and the Economic History Association 2010 are gratefully acknowledged. This work was financially supported by the Pact for Research and Innovation of the Leibniz Association and an Economic History Association Exploratory Travel and Data Grant 2009.