Danat-exposed cities showed no sharper pre-July-1931 unemployment downturn than other cities.

Evidence

Table 10 examines whether cities with a presence of Danatbank already experienced a sharper downturn in economic activity in the early phase of the Great Depression, that is, before July 1931. To this end, it reports results for variations of our baseline regression (see equation (2)), where the outcome variables are different measures of unemployment (in levels or changes) at the city level. Column (1) shows that cities with a Danat presence did not see a statistically significant change in the unemployment rate from 1929 to 1930, relative to cities with no Danat presence. Column (2) reports a similar result for the change in the unemployment rate from 1930 to 1931. Column (3) shows that there were also no significant differences in the 1930 unemployment rate across cities with and without Danat’s presence. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 144

Categorization

• QUESTION: Since the key causal claim is that a Jewish banker’s failure (with its elite/media framing) and not pure local economic loss drove Nazi gains, whether differential downturn preceded the bank failure is crucial to that identification; worth checking what other confounders this leaves open.
• XREF: connects to: Danat-exposed cities had no pre-crisis unemployment divergence from other cities — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 144; Nazi vote-share paths in Danat towns are flat before July 1931. — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 246

Broader Connections

• Danat-exposed cities had no pre-crisis unemployment divergence from other cities #corroborates (0.97) — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 144
• Nazi vote-share paths in Danat towns are flat before July 1931. #corroborates (0.85) — Sebastian Doerr et al., Financial Crises and Political…, 246