Greek Refugees: The Socioeconomic Consequences of the 1923 Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey

National Bureau Of Economic Research Inc, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract 1729908 Michalopoulos In 2015, Europe received about 1.3 million new asylum claims and more refugees are expected as the Middle East crises continue. Mandatory, large-scale population movements constitute a structural break in the economic and social history of modern nations. Understanding how involuntarily relocated people and the receiving communities fare economically are affected in the short- and long-run is of crucial social and economic importance. Moreover, how communities react to today's refugees is likely to be shaped by their historical experience of refugee flows. Data availability prevents the study of these issues. Roughly 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks were forcefully resettled from Turkey to Greece after the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, increasing the Greek population by 20% within few months. While several ethnographies document how this large number of refugees affected specific villages and towns, there is no systematic exploration of their overall impact. This research will assemble a large dataset and assess existing hypotheses regarding the influence of refugees on receiving economies and sending Turkish communities. Was there a systematic pattern of spatial settlement of refugees; how did the refugees fare economically; did the natives benefit; how do these questions affect the attitudes of the forced migrants and local population towards current refugees in Europe; and do answers to these questions depend on location of refugee settlement and time horizon considered? This research will digitize and geocode two main data archives---the 1928 Greek census which lists the number of refugees in the local communities and an individual level catalogue of 270,000 refugee families indicating village of origin in Turkey and destination in Greece. The data will be used to examine the rate of economic integration of refugees and their influence on the local economies using empirical tools of growth and labor economists. The dataset will also be valuable for studying the presence of agglomeration economies and/or diminishing returns associated with the influx of refugees, the role of religious homogenization of local communities, and their political attitudes towards current refugee flows. The data will be a valuable infrastructure for the study of the effects of large-scale immigration. The results of this research could provide valuable inputs into U.S. immigration policies. This research will study the impacts of large-scale population movements by exploiting a historical natural experiment---the compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century. Following the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox were forcibly resettled from Turkey to Greece, increasing the Greek population by more than 20% dramatically altering the socioeconomic landscape. This research will first, assemble an original dataset with comprehensive coverage of the universe of Greek villages and cities from 1920 till today and their respective refugee shares in 1928, and second, complement the highly disaggregated regional-level data with individual-level data from post-1970 Greek censuses as well as a unique historical catalogue of the universe of rural refugee families. These individual-level data, will be linked to region-specific statistics that are available over the 1920-2010 period and to the Greek Yellow Pages in 1980s onwards allowing the PIs to trace the occupational specialization of natives and refugees and their descendants. The data will then be used to explore the economic, social, and political status of both refugees and locals. The research will investigate the impact of this historical resettlement on the current political attitudes towards the ongoing refugee flows in Europe. The dataset will also be valuable for studying the presence of agglomeration economies and/or diminishing returns as well as the consequences of religious homogenization of local communities.