This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5 percent.

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1 March 2018

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Journal of Economic History 78(1) , pp.1-39, 2018

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DOI: 10.1017/S0022050718000037

This Journal article is published under the centre's Growth programme, Labour programme.