Jean Leray (November 7, 1906–November 10, 1998) was confined to an officers’ prison camp (“Oflag”) in Austria for the whole of World War II. There he took up algebraic topology, and the result was a spectacular flowering of highly original ideas, ideas which have, through the usual metamorphism of history, shaped the course of mathematics in the sixty years since then. Today we would divide his...

In this paper uses Kaname Akamatsu's 'Flying Geese' model to analyse Japan's role in East Asian integration. Japan made the first attempt to lead Asian countries before the Second World War. At that time, the Japanese Government embarked on a brutally expansionist policy the result of which was creation of the first gaggle of 'flying geese' under the name of the 'Greater East Asia CoProsperity ...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration...

Japan and Germany were allies during World War II, and both countries committed crimes. Even though the Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany was unprecedented in history, Japan has also been found guilty of serious misdemeanours. Today, Germany acknowledges the magnitude of its responsibility and strives to deal with this legacy. However, in Japan, we find no consensus on dealing with the matter...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector model of the economy, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigration...

Does immigration accelerate sectoral change towards high-productivity sectors? This paper uses the mass displacement of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe to West Germany after World War II as a natural experiment to study this question. A simple two-sector specific factors model, in which moving costs prevent the marginal product of labor to be equalized across sectors, predicts that immigrati...

During World War II and the brutal experience of German attacks against civilians on the home front, Britain underwent a consequential, yet unstudied, development. This total war elevated British psychoanalysis to a role not enjoyed anywhere else in the world. Under the shock of bombing and evacuation, exiled continental analysts such as Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) and Melanie Klein a...

The American “high school movement” of the early 20th century resulted in a dramatic rise in high school graduation rates, a trend that continued into the middle of the century interrupted only by World War II. Previous work has characterized the pre-World War II transformation of secondary education, but less attention has been focused on the continued increased in educational attainment after...