Highlights :

• During the early 1990s Germany received over half a million Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many of these refugees, who were under temporary protection, had been repatriated.
• We exploit this historical episode to provide causal evidence on the role that migrants play explaining export performance in global markets after returning to their home country.
• We find that the elasticity of exports to return migration is between 0.1 to 0.24 in industries where migrants were employed during their stay in Germany.
• In order to deal with endogeneity we use historic exogenous rules of allocation of asylum seekers across different German states to construct an instrumental variable for the treatment.
• The results are mostly driven by knowledge-intensive industries, and by workers in occupations intensive in analytical and managerial

 Abstract :
During the early 1990s Germany offered temporary protection to over 600,000 Yugoslavian refugees fleeing war. By 2000, many had been repatriated. We exploit this natural experiment to investigate the role of migrants in post-conflict reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia, using exports as outcome. Using confidential social security data to capture intensity of refugee workers to German industries –and exogenous allocation rules for asylum seekers within Germany as instrument– we find an elasticity of exports to return migration between 0.08 to 0.24. Our results are stronger in knowledge-intensive industries and for workers in occupations intensive in analytical and managerial skills.

 Keywords : Migration | Refugees | Knowledge Diffusion | Management | Exports | Productivity

 JEL : O33, F14, F22