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 employment alone accounted for 36% of the average
POW-employing mine’s annual productivity decline
over wartime. Estimates also suggest that the representative POW’s productivity averaged
32% of the representative regular miner’s productivity, and that POWs’ contribution to wartime coal
output amounted to 3.9%. Violence did not serve as a
powerful work incentive. The deposited files include a stata-file containing the data, a word-file containing the stata-code needed to replicate the results shown in the paper, and an excel-file containing the data on two figures.