Seminar Nation-building and Mass Migration: Evidence from Mandatory Palestine Econometrics/Applied Micro seminar Add to calendar 2024-11-18 11:00 2024-11-18 12:15 Europe/Rome Nation-building and Mass Migration: Evidence from Mandatory Palestine Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte YYYY-MM-DD Print Share on Facebook Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email When 18 November 2024 11:00 - 12:15 CET Where Seminar Room 3rd Floor Villa La Fonte Organised by Department of Economics In this seminar, Laura Panza (University of Melbourne) will present the paper 'Nation-building and Mass Migration: Evidence from Mandatory Palestine'. This paper focuses on the grassroots of nation-building in times of mass migration. We identify the key factors explaining social cohesion and the rise of societal leaders within the scattered, heterogeneous Jewish communities of Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1947. Our empirical strategy relies on a new frontier expansion algorithm to predict the dynamics of Jewish settlement creation, which we combine with migrant characteristics in a shift-share design to isolate exogenous variation in the local composition of settlers across locations. We find that: (i) leaders that were instrumental to nation-building in the early state of Israel are more likely to come from diverse communities; (ii) these diverse communities also ap-pear to be more cohesive—in spite of immigration challenges—and maintain better relationships with Arab neighbors; (iii) and these effects are mostly confined to kibbutzim, i.e., integrated settlements with communal lifestyle. Further evidence suggests that these diverse, tightly-knitted communities were facing nation-building challenges at a local level, i.e. setting up institutions to build a common identity.Co-author: Yanos Zylberberg Contact(s): Cecile Marie Brière (EUI - Department of Economics) Scientific Organiser(s): Prof. Andrea Ichino (EUI - Department of Economics) Speaker(s): Prof. Laura Panza (University of Melbourne)