After D-day? Destruction, Catch up, and Leapfrog

How do conflicts shape territories in the long run? To answer this question, this paper dissects population dynamics within Normandy throughout the 20th century. Despite the destruction caused by the 1944 Allied Landings, Normandy reversed the demographic decline it had experienced until 1940 — a dynamic at odds with previous literature showing a negative or neutral effect of conflicts. Using a difference-in-differences estimator, we confirm that within Normandy, combat duration dampened population growth in the short run. In the medium run, areas exposed to combat recovered and later overshot the population levels implied by their initial trend. An analysis of a comprehensive inventory of all dwelling units 25 years after WWII suggests that the post-war reconstruction effort explains this counterintuitive pattern. These results evidence the importance of reconstruction policies after conflicts. Beyond geographic fundamentals and random factors, they carve the spatial distribution of economic activities.