Shizuka Inoue

Opinion is sharply divided about whether the bombing of an enemy's civilian targets and the killing of their combatants result in an adversary's population becoming pacifist or pro-military. Identification is difficult because natural experiments are rare, and effects may be heterogeneous. For example, killing enemy combatants may create martyrs, while targeting civilians may lower their pro-war morale. We solve this problem by leveraging a natural experiment in Japan in which military casualties and urban destruction varied exogenously, but differentially, across cities. We then estimate the impact of devastation and slaughter on support for Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, which aims to revise Japan's constitution to enable it to rearm. We find contrasting effects of targeting soldiers and civilians—military deaths induce future pro-military voting, while urban destruction induces pacifist voting. Moreover, these effects persist long after most people with direct experience of the war have died.

I study Japan's post-WWII repatriation of six million people, one of the largest migration episodes in modern history, to examine how population shocks affect economic growth through firm modernization. Exploiting Allied repatriation logistics and predetermined family registry locations for identification, I show that high-skilled repatriates, who had accumulated managerial human capital through administrative and supervisory work in the colonies, generated productivity gains by modernizing local economies. Cities receiving more high-skilled repatriates shifted from traditional production to modern, multi-unit firms with outside managers. This managerial capital relaxed organizational constraints, allowing firms to absorb agricultural workers and accelerate structural transformation. By contrast, low-skilled inflows increased labor supply but contributed little to modernization. I interpret these findings by developing a spatial model where managers enable firm modernization. Counterfactuals show that the growth effects of population shocks depend critically on migrant composition, highlighting firm modernization as a central channel.