Abstract
We study the role of professional networks in facilitating emigration of Jewish academics dismissed from their jobs by the Nazi government. We use individual-level exogenous variation in the timing of dismissals to estimate the causal effect of networks. Academics with more ties to early émigrés (emigrated 1933-1934) were more likely to emigrate. Early émigrés functioned as “bridging nodes” that facilitated emigration to their own destination. We also distinguish between three kinds of social networks – family, community, or professional networks and study their relative importance. Lastly, we provide some of the first empirical evidence of decay in social ties over time.