Shizuka Inoue

Does managerial scarcity keep firms small and local, slowing economic development? I study this question using Japan's forced postwar repatriation of six million nationals from former colonies, many with experience relevant to management and supervision. I exploit settlement variation generated by predetermined family-registry locations and Allied-directed landing-port routing. Districts receiving more repatriates with such experience shifted employment toward wage work, manufacturing, and services. Firms grew larger, expanded beyond their headquarters cities, and participated more in overseas programs teaching modern U.S. management practices. I develop a spatial model in which greater manager supply lowers the cost of supervising establishments and adopting firm-wide practices reusable across them, enabling modern firms to expand across markets and draw workers out of agriculture and self-employment into wage work. Removing the inflow of workers with managerial and supervisory experience would have lowered aggregate output per worker by 4.1 percent, one quarter of which operates through multi-establishment networks.

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.