the emigration of german-speaking economists after 1933

American Economic Association

The Emigration of German-Speaking Economists after 1933Author(s): F. M. SchererSource: Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 2000), pp. 614-626Published by: American Economic AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2565422 .

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Journal of Economic Literature Vol. XXXVIII (September 2000) pp. 614-626

The Emigration of German-Speaking Economists after 1933

F. M. SCHERER'

1. Introduction

IN APRIL 1933, the newly empowered German government led by Adolf

Hitler enacted a law "for the restoration of the civil service" (my translation).2 Approximately three thousand teachers (civil servants under German administrative law), along with many others holding research and administrative positions, were dismissed from their jobs because they were non-Aryan (e.g., of Jewish de- scent) or because of enunciated (typi- cally social democrat or socialist) political views unacceptable to the Hitler regime. Others who were not employed as civil servants were placed in jeopardy by the escalating governmental repres- sion. Many of the individuals affected by these changes emigrated and sought to rebuild their lives in more hospitable environments. Among them were numer- ous professional economists and students of economics a discipline particularly susceptible to clashes with NSDAP doctrine.

The contours and consequences of German-speaking economists' emigration have been detailed in a series of books, the extensive research for which

was led by Professor Harald Hagemann of the University of Hohenheim (near Stuttgart), Germany. First in the series (Hagemann and Klaus-Dieter Krohn 1992) was a compendium of stan- dardized biographical information on 314 emigres. Next came a volume (Hagemann 1997) combining autobiographical essays, some in English and some in German, by seven emigre economists, with fifteen diversely- authored papers analyzing the causes and consequences of the emigration. The most recent contribution (Hage- mann and Krohn 1999) is a two-volume set with detailed biographical essays (all in German) on 328 emigre economists. My review here focuses mainly on the most recent two volumes (hereafter, Bi- ographies), supplemented by insights drawn from essays in the 1997 collection (hereafter, Emigration).

Within German universities, the inci- dence of employment terminations was uneven. Hardest hit were the universities at Frankfurt/Main, Heidelberg, and Kiel, where 25 of the 54 professorial chair-holders in economics were dismissed (Biographies, p. xviii). The high discharge rates were attributable in part to strong representation of Jews and social democrats on the faculties and partly to the appointment of particularly fanatic Nazis to top administrative

1 Harvard University emeritus; Princeton Uni- versity. The author is indebted to the editor and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

2 Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Beruf- beamtentums.

614



Scherer: The Emigration of German-Sveaking Economnists 615

positions. In southern Germany, on the other hand, only one chair-holder among 34 was dismissed at the universities of Munich, Tuebingen, and Frei- burg, at least in part because in that more conservative region, social democrats and Jews were unable even before 1933 to obtain professorial appoint- ments. The sole exception was Robert Liefmann of Freiburg, properly viewed as the father of modern industrial or- ganization analysis on the Continent, who died at a concentration camp in 1940.

The Biographies volumes and many of the essays in Emigration are valuable primarily as a source of biographical information richer and more comprehensive than what can be found in the three editions of Who's Who in Eco- nomics and, with the exception of a few superstars, in literature on the history of economic thought. Taken together, the three most recent volumes also raise two issues of broader interest: (1) how the emigres were absorbed into productive activity in other nations during a period, at least until the beginning of World War II, plagued by substantial unemployment; and (2) what impact emigration had on the evolution of economic thought and its diffusion through teaching in the nations from which the emigres departed and those in which they sought refuge.

In his introduction to Emigration, Professor Hagemann quotes an observa- tion by Paul Samuelson (1988, p. 319): "The triumphant rise of American economics after 1940 was enormously accelerated by importation of scholars from Hitlerian Europe." In a follow-on sentence not quoted by Hagemann, Samuelson goes on to observe some- what contradictorily that "free trade in ideas is a powerful substitute for free trade in the productive factor called professors." Thus, evaluating the impact

of emigration is complicated by the public good properties of economic knowledge. In what follows, I shall try to deal with this problem using both qualitative and quantitative evidence.

2. Absorption into New Environments

Not all of the 328 individuals surveyed in the Biographies volumes actu- ally emigrated. Thirteen fell into the hands of the police and were either killed or died in concentration camps; two others left Germany for nations later occupied by German armed forces, where they disappeared without a further trace. Three committed sui- cide under conditions attributable to their actual or impending exile-one Austrian, Karl Schlesinger, on the day of the Anschluss in 1938. Also included were seventeen economists who lost their academic or government positions but did not emigrate. Some survived the concentration camps; three died in freedom shortly after losing their jobs; others were able to obtain less politi- cally sensitive employment in the private sector; and still others endured the Hitler period in retirement. Several of the resident survivors resumed academic positions following the war's end. In addition, 24 economists (by my count) emigrated but returned to more or less permanent academic or administrative positions in (divided) Germany or Austria after 1945.

Altogether, 296 of the 328 individuals surveyed in the Biographies volumes were classified as having emigrated from Germany, Austria, and occupied nations. Many passed through multiple nations before establishing new roots, so a classification of destinations cannot avoid some imprecision. These included 221 so-called first-generation emigres who had already acquired at least some of their advanced education in economics



616 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. XXXVIII (September 2000)

and also 75 children of emigres who became economists in their new home- lands. Of the 221 first-generation emigres, 131, or 59 percent, were found by compilers Hagemann and Krohn to have settled in the United States, 35 in Great Britain, eight in Israel (my count, including second-generation economists, shows eleven), seven (at least temporarily; all eventually went elsewhere) in Turkey, seven in Latin Amer- ica, and the rest in sundry other nations (Biographies, p. xxiv). Among the same 221 who were either employed or had completed their studies before emigrating, 131 (including 46 who had not been teaching before their departure) obtained university positions. Others entered domestic and international civil service positions, banking, journalism, and other private sector jobs. Few (somewhere between four and twelve) were found to have experienced career dead ends.

Absorption of the emigres into new and productive lives was encouraged by some remarkable interventions. In the United States, the Rockefeller Founda- tion provided financial assistance to help many emigres become re-established, among other things offering to pay half the academic salary of individuals accepted onto college or university faculties until they obtained a permanent position in the institution's budget (Biographies, p. xi). A facilitating condi- tion was the 42-percent growth of U.S. university and college student enroll- ments between 1934 and 1940 and a 35- percent increase in faculty positions. One of the most prominent collecting points was the New School for Social Research, which in 1933 established a "university in exile" with a faculty made up of expatriates (Emigration, pp. 383- 403). These arrangements helped over- come immigration barriers erected by the United States. In particular, for

those who did not qualify under se- verely constraining national quotas, having a job offer from the New School or another institution made it possible to secure otherwise unattainable visas.3 In England, William Beveridge of the London School of Economics organized an Academic Assistance Council to support refugee economists financially and help them find new employment. With Rockefeller Foundation support, the Oxford Institute of Statistics was a leading source of temporary employment for emigres to Great Britain.

3. Inclusions and Exclusions

Complicating an evaluation of what impact emigration had is the fact that the individuals covered by Biographies were only part of a larger exodus of economists from the nations most se- verely impacted by the events leading to and accompanying World War II. Omitted from the collection are economists who fled the European continent but who, as residents of nations in which German was not regularly spo- ken, were assumed not to satisfy a "Ger- man-speaking" inclusion criterion. By excluding such exiled superstars as Franco Modigliani, Evsey Domar, Leonid Hurwicz, Zvi Griliches, Gregory Grossman, Morton Kamien, Michal Ka- lecki, Jan Kmenta, Walter Adams, Tjal- ling Koopmans, Oskar Lange, Tibor Sci- tovsky, and many others, the collection understates the impact fascism and its Soviet counterpart had on the flow of economist emigres. Some subtle but un- derstandable mistakes were made in this regard. The authors can hardly be blamed for not knowing, for example, that Morton Kamien was spirited out of the Warsaw ghetto in 1944 to be raised

3 For an account of the difficulties less well-con- nected refugees faced, see Max Frankel (1999), pp. 3-35.



Scherer: The Emiaration of German-Speaking, Economists 617

by a German-speaking family, or that Zvi Griliches was forced to become German-speaking to survive as a youth- ful forced laborer (exiled from Lithu- ania) at the Dachau concentration camp. More puzzling are the exclusion of the famous location theorist August Loesch, whose teaching career in Kiel ended when he refused to take an oath of allegiance to Hitler (Emigration, p. 129); and Heinrich von Stackelberg, who initially supported fascism but em- braced Freiburg free-market views in the 1940s and in mid-1944 took a guest professorship in Spain, where he died two years later from a rare disease.

In determining whom to include as emigre economists and whom to ex- clude, decisions, sometimes subjective, had to be made. One of the most important choices was to include not only those who were already practicing or studying economics (or cognate disci- plines) at the time Hitler came to power, but also the children of emigres who later became professional economists. Counted in the first generation were 253 individuals; the second generation includes 75 additional biographies. For first-generation subjects, the principal inclusion criterion was that teaching, administrative, or student slots were lost beginning in 1933 as a direct consequence of the Nazi laws. Some close calls were made. Wassily Leontief was excluded because he left the Institute for International Econom- ics in Kiel for Harvard in 1931, well before the ascent of Hitler became a recognized threat. Joseph Schumpeter was included, even though he left Bonn for Harvard in the summer of 1932 to grasp an opportunity and not to avoid a threat, because Schumpeter's mental at- titude during his eighteen years in the United States remained essentially that of an exile (Biographies, p. 640).

Economists from Austria posed spe-

cial classification problems. Austria was not annexed by Germany until March 1938. Many of the 45 Austrian economists chosen for inclusion emigrated before then, when the threat of Hitler's laws was less pressing. The rationale for their inclusion turns on an indirect effect. The University of Vienna, by far the leading center for economic research and study in Austria, exhibited during the 20th Century a remarkable facility for granting key professorships to second-rate economists who resisted the implantation of modern ideas, freez- ing out more able and energetic younger scholars. This occurred in part because of pre-Nazi anti-Semitism, but also because of the long-standing Viennese blindness to resident genius that helps explain why Mozart, Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and (in the last year of his life) Vivaldi died in poverty. (See Emi- gration, pp. 479-500; and Earline Craver 1986.) Ambitious younger people seek- ing good professorial chairs had pre- viously looked to Germany for opportu- nities. But with Hitler's rise to power, that outlet was largely closed off, and so emigration to non-German-speaking lands became the next-best alternative. Some such as Ludwig von Mises were remarkably prescient of the threat Nazi Germany posed to continuing Austrian independence (Craver 1986, p. 25). Others waited until the Anschluss of 1938 presented an immediate danger.

During the 1930s, on which the dis- placements motivating the Hagemann et al. volumes primarily focus, the lines between economics, business manage- ment, and sociology were much less clear than they are today. At the Uni- versity of Vienna and some German universities, economists received their de- grees from the law faculties, which also covered sociology and cognate subjects. Perhaps because of this blurring, the selection of emigre economists includes




some individuals, most prominently Amitai Etzioni, Karl Polanyi, and Peter Drucker, who would not by current standards be identified as economists.

4. The Impact on Anglo-American Economics

We return to the difficult question of what impact the emigration of several hundred incumbent or would-be economists had on economics as it has been published, taught, and practiced in the English-speaking world. Many of the exiles found their way into economic research and teaching away from the European continent. And as Craver and Axel Leijonhufvud (1987) observe, sur- veying a wider array of emigres than those covered in the Hagemann et al. volumes:

The American economics profession was far, far smaller before World War II than today [1987]. Could it have mustered fifty homegrown economists of the same generation to match, heavyweight for heavyweight, the immigrants in enduring reputations? Probably so-but not all that obviously so. What is obvious in any case is that the influx of Continental scholars was quantitatively significant and helped many American universities to build graduate programs of distinction.

They continue, however, by raising the more difficult question: "But what was their impact on economics [my emphasis added] in America?"

Although scientific knowledge is commonly treated as a pure public good, there is evidence from recent studies of physical science and technology that spillovers are frequently localized, having their most immediate impact through face-to-face interaction between knowledge creators and those who extend and apply the new knowledge. See e.g. David Audretsch and Paula Stephan (1996), Lee Branstetter (1996), and Adam Jaffe and Manuel Trachtenberg (1998).

Conceivably, face-to-face contact may be more important in the progress of physical sciences and technology, and especially, as Audretsch and Stephan show for biotechnology, in supplying the tacit knowledge needed to imple- ment specific applications, than in social sciences such as economics. It seems clear, for example, that without the contributions of emigre scientists the atomic bomb could not have been developed in time for its highly contro- versial use to accelerate the end of World War II. Seminal early funding for research on "the uranium problem" was initiated when President Roosevelt received a letter signed by emigre Al- bert Einstein and drafted by emigres Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, and Ed- ward Teller.4 And without the hands-on work of emigres Szilard, Wigner, Teller, Enrico Fermi, George Kistiakowski, Otto Frisch, Stanislaw Ulam, and others, the development effort at Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge would almost surely have progressed more slowly.

Path-breaking English-language contributions to economic theory by John Maynard Keynes, Roy Harrod, Joan Robinson, and others diffused across national borders into the mainstream of U.S. economics rapidly. But few native U.S. economists, of either the prewar or postwar generations, read foreign lan- guages easily, and translation lags were often substantial. An English-language version of Walras' Elements (1883) did not appear until 1954; the English translation of Schumpeter's Theory of Economic Development (1911) was published only in 1934, when Schumpeter had

4 What is not well known is that the letter de- livered to President Roosevelt by emigre Alexan- der Sachs was called to Sachs' attention by economist emigre Gustav Stolper, who is included in Biographies. See Richard Rhodes (1986, pp. 303- 14).



Scherer: The Emigration of German- Speaking Economists 619

joined the Harvard University faculty; Heinrich von Stackelberg's pioneering Marktform und Gleichgewicht (1934) did not become accessible to English- speaking economists until popularized by emigre William Fellner's summary in Competition among the Few (1949); and Robert Liefmann's work has been made available to the German language-im- paired only through a brief English-language article (1915). The arrival of the Hagemann sample and other emigres in English-speaking nations undoubtedly accelerated the translation and hence transmission of contributions that otherwise would have been less accessible. Had World War II not occurred, Ger- man economists might plausibly have continued to publish much of their work in German. Although German- speaking economists of the postwar generation have for the most part em- braced English as a lingua franca, the few older economists of substantial abil- ity who remained in Germany continued to emphasize their mother tongue in publications.

Another way the diffusion of knowledge is localized is through the development of "schools" whose initial disci- ples learn at the master's feet. The most prominent of these among the German emigres was the Ludwig von Mises school, which, if success depended only upon the fervor of the subsequent disci- ples' missionary efforts, might today be the leading brand of economics taught in American universities. On Mises' "private seminars" in Vienna and New York, see Craver (1986) and Craver and Leijonhufvud (1987). Needless to say, more than fervor is required for success. A school stressing the importance of technological change developed around Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard. Among the seven economists who made up an inter-university committee charged (and funded) by the Ford Foundation to en-

courage studies of technological change during the mid-1960s, at least four of us (Jesse Markham, M. J. Peck, Richard Nelson, and myself) confessed to being Schumpeterians, and a fifth, Jacob Schmookler, was influenced primarily by Simon Kuznets (an emigre from Rus- sia not included in the Hagemann et al. sample) and secondarily by Schumpe- ter. Yet doubts intrude, since Schumpe- terian notions were "in the air" at the time. In reply to my direct query a decade ago, Robert Solow said that his work on technical change in aggregate production functions was not significantly influenced by Schumpeter, even though Solow attended Schumpeter's lectures at Harvard.5

A more subtle but significant influence arose through the differing per- ceptions and values European emigres introduced, complementing and strength- ening the likelihood of advances that would have emerged sooner or later from native-born economists. Craver and Leijonhufvud (1987, p. 181) argue that European emigres such as Jacob Marschak, Gerhard Tintner, and Abra- ham Wald (included in Biographies) along with Trygve Haavelmo and Tjal- ling Koopmans (excluded from Biogra- phies) created a critical mass, first in New York and then at the Cowles Com- mission workshop in Chicago, that brought about a fruitful marriage between econometrics and economic theory. The Europeans' seminal contributions to that revolution stemmed in part, Craver and Leijonhufvud suggest, from greater readiness to take the empirical orientation of the physical sciences as the epistemological model for

5Solow's perspective is reflected more astrin- gently in a recent article (1994, p. 52): "Schumpe- ter is a sort of patron saint in this [the economic growth] field. I might be alone in thinking that he should be treated like a patron saint: paraded around one day each year and more or less ig- nored the rest of the time."




a "scientific" economics.6 Similarly, in his autobiographical essay in Emigra- tion, Richard Musgrave illustrates his own symbiotic experience. In Germany, his training stressed law and institutions, and among other things, he was imbued with appreciation for the posi- tive role governmental expenditure policies played in the economy. Con- tinuing his graduate studies at Harvard, where the role of government (at least until the appearance of Alvin Hansen) was viewed much less sympathetically, he acquired the analytic tools stressed in Anglo-American programs. From this combination of traditions resulted among other things his great treatise, The Theory of Public Finance, from which most economists of my generation received their training in public sector economics. And last but perhaps not least, the world view emigre economists such as Albert Hirschman, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, Alexander Ger- schenkron, Paul Streeten, Hans Singer, and Berthold Hoselitz, among others, brought to their new positions comple- mented their training in historical pro- cesses to make them leaders in the newly-emerging specialty of development economics.

Finally, there are tours de force which might not have occurred, or at least whose advent would have been ap- preciably delayed, but for historical ac- cidents that placed emigres in the right place at the right time. The most com- pelling case is the theory of games, whose genesis came from the team effort of John

von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern at their new Princeton home base.

5. Quantitative Evidence

It is easier to assemble individual success stories than to assess systemati- cally how the world of Anglo-American economics would have evolved in the counterfactual case of no emigration. In his introductory essay to Biographies, Professor Hagemann notes that of the first twenty Nobel prizes awarded to American economists, fourteen went to individuals who were not born in the United States. However, among the 328 economists surveyed in Biographies, only one-Friedrich von Hayek-became a Nobel laureate. In the political milieu nearer their new American home base, the German-speaking emigres were more successful. Hagemann ob- serves that German-speaking emigres Schumpeter, Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, William Fellner, and Jacob Marschak were named as presidents of the American Economic Association. To this list he might have added Biogra- phies subjects Ludwig von Mises, Alex- ander Gerschenkron, Oskar Morgen- stern, Albert Hirschman, and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, who were among the first 34 distinguished fellows named by the American Economic Association between 1965 and 1985; plus Robert Au- mann, Michael Bruno, Max Corden, and Frank Hahn, who were honorary foreign members of the AEA still living as of 1993.

Another measure is selection for cov- erage in Who's Who in Economics (Mark Blaug and Paul Sturgis 1983). Since the second and third editions are less exclu- sive and farther removed in time from the career peaks of most German emigre economists, I focus on the first edition. It included 674 economists be- lieved to be living at the time of its

6 That state-of-the-art economics continues to differ from the queen of natural sciences, physics, is suggested by a summary of research projects re- ported in 1995 by the 41 active professorial members of Harvard's physics department, ranked in that year as the top U.S. physics department in a National Research Council survey. Ten of the 41 were working exclusively on theory, six on a combination of theory and experimentation, and 25 on essentially experimental projects (the analogue of empirical work in economics).



Scherer: The Emigration of German-Speaking Economists 621

publication, plus 397 deceased economists. By my tally, 43 of the economists surveyed in Biographies were included in the 1983 edition of Who's Who in Economics. Taking a broader definition than the Hagemann et al. volumes, at least eighty of those for whom sufficient biographic information was presented were emigres between 1920 and 1950 from the territories occupied by Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union.

A possibility left unexplored by Hage- mann and Krohn is the analysis of publication citations, used as one criterion for inclusion in Who's Who. Opting for meticulousness in identifying relevant citations correctly over comprehensive- ness,7 I focused on citations recorded for the 328 Biographies subjects over the five-year period 1966-70. It was the second five-year period for which a So- cial Sciences Citation Index (hereafter, SSCI) was published; I chose it over the 1960-64 volumes because it allowed time for the second generation of emigre economists to complete the third decade of their lives, during which, ac- cording to an obiter dictum by Schum- peter,8 scholars tend to make their most

seminal contributions precipitating later peer recognition through citations. Six- teen of the Biographies subjects were born in 1930 or later. Most were of much earlier vintage; the median birth year for all 328 was 1902.

Altogether, 10,974 citations could be attributed to the 328 Biographies subjects, 329 of them for works published before 1934 and 10,645 for later publications. Among the 10,974 citations, 10,130, or 92 percent, were of the works of authors who had emigrated to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

Relative to the universe of economic publications and their influence, posi- tive or negative, mirrored by citations, how large was the impact of the emigres? To find out, a universal bench- mark must be established. The most suitable candidate is the tally of citations, attributed first to authors and then to U.S. economics departments, prepared by David Laband (1985). La- band's citation counts are drawn from issues of SSCI for the 13-year period from 1971 through 1983. Mine are for a shorter and earlier five-year period. For a valid comparison, it must be recognized that the numbers of scholars and journals were increasing rapidly between 1965 and 1983. The total number of citation columns included in SSCI, citation lines per column remaining essentially unaltered, was 29,181 for the 1966-70 volumes I consulted and (estimating a rough split within the 1981-85 volumes) approximately 141,956 over Laband's 1971-83 survey period. Thus, the Laband citation universe was 4.865 times larger than the universe contained by my survey.

Dividing the Laband totals by 4.865, one finds that Harvard, the most-cited department, obtained an adjusted total of 5,046 citations and the top ten

7 The counts nevertheless suffer in some re- spects from the standard problems associated with Social Sciences Citation Index methodology. Only first authors are tabulated, so coauthored works in which the person of interest is listed second or later are missed. There are many misspellings, especially of Germanic names involving umlauts or characters (e.g., double-s) not used in English; these were combatted by scrutiny of plausibTe alternative spellings. Many entries provide only a last name or a single first-name initial, and especially for widely used names (such as Mueller or Weber), citations are not easily matched exactly with authors unless a complete list of publications is available. (Biographies contains only incomplete lists.) Cross-checking avoided some but not all problems of this sort. Discriminating among publication dates is also difficult, since many citations to important works refer to later editions, transla- tions, or reprints. The dating split used here ac- cepts the dates as they are recorded, making no attempt to infer original (and often unknowable) publication dates.

8 See Robert Loring Allen (1991), p. 51.




TABLE 1 THE 20 CITATION COUNT LEADERS

Amitai Etzioni 711 Joseph A. Schumpeter 503 Richard Musgrave 487 Fritz Machlup 434 Albert Hirschman 394

Abraham Wald 362 Otto Eckstein 276 George Katona 271 Peter Drucker 270 Berthold Hoselitz 221

William Fellner 217 John von Neumann 206 Frank Hahn 203 Erich Schneider 182 Gottfried Haberler 181

Werner Hirsch 175 Friedrich von Hayek 170 Karl Polanyi 162 Jacob Marschak 154 Gerhard Tintner 154

universities 32,167 citations.9 Thus, the citations received by the German-speaking emigre scholars were roughly equivalent to the adjusted citation output of the first-ranked Harvard and second-ranked MIT plus the 19th-ranked University of Illinois economics departments. Or drawing from slightly lower strata of Laband's citation rankings, the emigre scholars' citations were roughly equivalent to the summed citations of the seventh- through eleventh-ranked departments, i.e., the University of Cali- fornia-Berkeley, Columbia, Wisconsin, UCLA, and New York University. By these yardsticks, the contribution of the emigre scholars was substantial indeed.

As with all such scholarly output mea- sures, the distribution of citations was highly skew. The average number of ci-

tations per sample member was 33.5, the median 4. Eighty-four individuals had no citations and 118 had from one to ten citations. A log normal distribution fits the data fairly well. 10

The twenty citation leaders, with 50.7 percent of all 328 subjects' citations, are listed in Table 1. Two sociologists, Ami- tai Etzioni and Karl Polanyi, are prominent among the top twenty. John von Neumann's count (mostly for his work with Oskar Morgenstern on game theory)" would be much higher if citations in physical science and mathematics journals were included. Only one of the top twenty, Erich Schneider, returned from exile to a permanent teaching position in Germany after World War II.

There were appreciable differences in average citation counts for identifi- able groups (by my classification, not the authors'), as Table 2 reveals. Those who emigrated to the United States or Canada received on average 2.72 times as many citations as those who emigrated elsewhere or remained in Ger- many. The difference between group averages is statistically significant at the 0.01 level, with F(1,326) = 16.63.12 Whether this difference reflects the bias in SSCI toward English-language journals whose authors cite foreign-language contributions relatively infre- quently, richer opportunity for and stimulus to research and publication in North American universities, or the en- dogenous lure of the largest "market" to the most ambitious scholars,13 is unclear.

9Laband began by identifying economics department members as of 1983-84; thus, his counts do not include the undoubtedly substantial number of citations received by economists associated with business, public administration, and other schools or departments.

10 For these and other logarithmic tests, zero values were assumed to be 0.3.

11 The count for Morgenstern, largely excluding that jointly-authored book, was 139.

12 To approximate normality of the distributions analyzed, logarithms were taken and zero values were again converted to 0.3 in these tests. A test of the untransformed data yielded a similar F-ratio.

13 My current research reveals that the largest geographic "imarkets" exerted a disproportionate pull on the most prolific music composers during the 18th and 19th centuries.




TABLE 2 AVERAGE CITATION COUNTS FOR SUB-GROUPS

Number Mean Median

Principal emigration destination: United States and Canada 193 45.2 8.0 U.K., Australia, and New Zealand 59 24.1 4.0 Israel and Turkey 18 13.0 2.5 Rest of world 27 19.4 3.0

Returned to West Germany or Austria 24 15.2 2.5 Survived to 1945 without leaving 14 12.4 1.5 Returned to German Democratic Republic 8 2.4 1.5 Listed in 1983 Who's Who in Economics 43 128.4 101.0 All individuals in Biographies 328 33.5 4.0

Scholars emigrating to the United King- dom, Australia, and New Zealand had ready access to English-language journals well-tracked by SSCI. The difference between mean citation counts for North American emigres and those of emigres to other English-speaking nations, although impressive, is not statistically significant. Also not significant are the mean differences among other smaller groups.

The impact of isolation from western publication outlets is especially appar- ent for the eight economists who returned to positions in East Germany after the war.

The birth years of individuals listed in Biographies ranged from 1860 to 1938. Ninety-three were still living at the time the Biographies compilers completed their records. Citation counts might be biased against economists who were still in their thirties in the 1966- 70 interval, and who therefore did not yet have a full career to generate citable publications. On the other hand, works that might once have been seminal are gradually forgotten, so the citations of particularly ancient scholars could also suffer. This implies a statistical model of the form:

CITES(T)i = (RELEVANT LIFE 1) SPAN)O e -5(T - BIRTHYEAR - 30) F

where CITES is assumed to be centered on the year T = 1968; the relevant life span (RLS) is the lesser of years lived minus 25 or (for those still living in 1968) 1968 - BIRTHYEAR - 25; and 6 is a depreciation coefficient. The construc- tion of the RLS term assumes that the average scholar's productive life begins at age 25. The exponential decay term assumes that depreciation of one's contributions to knowledge begins with works published at age 30.14 Diminishing marginal productivity over a scholar's life span would imply a value of cc less than unity. Taking logarithms,15 we have:

Ln CITES = (2) oc In RLS - 6 (T - BIRTHYEAR - 30).

Estimating this relationship with the citation data for the 328 individuals included in Biographies, we obtain:

Ln CITES = 1.114 + 0.746 ln RLS (0.95) (0.326)

- 0.061 (T - BIRTHYEAR - 30); (3) (0.010)

with R2 = 0.123 and with standard er- rors given in subscripted parentheses. The lifetime productivity coefficient is significantly different from zero but not

14 It also has the convenient property of a zero exponent for the most recently born scholar in the sample.

15 Again, zero citation values are entered as 0.3. Assuming instead a value of 0.1 for zeroes, the estimated depreciation rate increases to 0.069.




500 - ,- 0

'C~~~ 100 ~ ~ 00 C) ~~~~~~0

-1 ** * * "* 0 10 20 30 0 50

0 10 20 30 40 50 6070 8

Years from Attainment of Age 30 to 1968

Figure 1. Plot of Citation Counts Against Years from Age 30 to 1968 328 German-Speaking Dislocated Economists

from the 1.0 value associated with con- stant marginal productivity. The 8 coefficient is highly significant, implying a 6.1 percent annual depreciation rate for contributions to knowledge. The relatively low R2 value reveals considerable resid- ual variation associated with variables other than age and timing.16

The scatter diagram presented in Fig- ure 1 reinforces the unexplained vari- ance inference but adds a new insight.17 The reduced form relationship between years from the peak of one's creative powers (assumed to occur at age thirty) and subsequent citations appears best characterized by a frontier production function (dashed line). A handful of scholars operate at the frontier; even

fewer (notably, Amitai Etzioni in the younger cohort and Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Weber among the immor- tals) are outliers.18 For the mass of less productive scholars, the association between years elapsed and citation counts is extremely noisy. But for those at the frontier, there is a rather sharply de- fined relationship, with citations rising as the scholar's portfolio grows up to an age of roughly sixty and then declining as obsolescence reinforces diminishing marginal productivity. Also noteworthy in Figure 1 is the dearth of scholars born after 1920 (i.e., reaching age thirty after 1950) with no citations or with only one or two citations. This suggests

16 Further tests rejected the hypothesis of a nonlinear (quadratic) depreciation effect, with the impact growing and then declining. Depreciation occurred throughout the relevant period.

17 For ease of interpretation, the citation values are in logarithms to the base 10 rather than to base e.

18 The other less extreme right-hand-side outliers are Karl Polanyi, who wrote on sociology and tribal economies, and Eugen Schmalenbach, who wrote on accounting and business finance. Schum- peter and Weber also made significant contributions in sociology, which may be more citation-in- tensive or have slower depreciation rates than economics.




a selection bias: first-generation emi- grants' sons and daughters were included in the Biographies sample only if they distinguished themselves through cited publications.

6. The Impact in Germany and Austria

It seems clear that economics in the Anglo-American world was greatly en- riched by the emigre economists, indi- cated inter alia by extensive citation to their publications. On the other side of the picture, there is consensus that the exodus of hundreds of economists, mostly through emigration but partly through premature death, was disas- trous for the profession of economics in Austria and especially in Germany. Many of the best economists within Germany and Austria left their positions not only because of racial and political prejudice, but also because they were unwilling to continue working where freedom of thought was thor- oughly suppressed. Leading research organizations were demolished (Emi- gration, pp. 293-341). The top German economics journals, once highly re- spected, lost their stature, among other things for censoring a translated article by John Maynard Keynes to make it po- litically acceptable (Emigration, p. 15). The economics professors who remained, however able, were those will- ing to bend their principles sufficiently to live with the Hitler regime. The crassest opportunists among them who actively supported the NSDAP were largely weeded out in the denazification program that followed World War II. The human capital upon which rebuild- ing had to commence after the war was for the most part meager. Some aug- mentation occurred with the return of theoretically trained, productive scholars such as Erich Schneider to Germany and Kurt Rothschild to Austria. Ambi-

tious young Germans and Austrians who recognized the limitations of local faculties travelled abroad for their Ph.D. studies. The return of some, despite continuing prejudice in university ap- pointments procedures against those who had not done at least a Habilitation locally, strengthened the teaching base and led to gradual curricular improve- ments. From experience since the mid- 1950s observing, working in, and help- ing build German institutions, I believe it is fair to say that it took decades for economics in German and Austrian universities to regain strength equivalent to what existed at the start of the 1930s.

7. Conclusion

A recent study by economists Sharon Levin and Paula Stephan (1999) found that scientists immigrating into the United States, working mostly in the physical and biological sciences, wrote highly cited or "classic" publications and gained membership in prestigious groups such as the National Academies of Science disproportionate to their numbers within relevant disciplinary cohorts. The same conclusion appears to hold with respect to immigrant economists. The German-speaking emigres covered by Biographies comprised only a subset of those who were dis- placed by World War II and its totali- tarian antecedents. But even that subset made intellectual contributions, mea- sured by election to honorific positions and citations to their published work equivalent to the output of several top- ranked U.S. economics departments. Their relatively high productivity suggests that the move to a new environ- ment enhanced the abilities they brought from their native lands and/or that the most ambitious among them sought new locations in which they could make the largest contributions, and




probably some mixture of both effects. Ill winds do blow some good.

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