“Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment”, 2021-12-17 (; backlinks; similar):
In 1942 more than 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the U.S. West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to 3 years. This paper studies how internees’ careers were affected in the long run.
Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data, I develop a predictor of a person’s internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that:
internment had long-run positive effects on earnings.
The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased mobility due to re-optimization of occupation and location choices, possibly facilitated by camps’ high economic diversity.