No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880
Abstract
We document the intergenerational mobility of Black and White American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities in mobility, with White children having far better chances of escaping the bottom of the distribution than Black children in every generation. This mobility gap was more important in proximately determining each generation's racial gap than was the initial gap in parents' economic status. (JEL D31, J15, J62, N31, N32)
... Table 5 shows the impact of Rosenwald schools on the occupational standing of Black men and women. In Columns (1) and (2), we assess whether Blacks exposed to Rosenwald schools had better jobs on average in 1940, as measured by the race-and region-specific occupational income scores from Collins and Wanamaker (2022), either in logs or in percentile ranks. 15 Employing race-specific occupational income scores is important since Black and white workers with the same job title often had different duties and earned different wages. ...
... As such, we cannot reject the possibility that some gains may have materialized after 1940. 28 Relevantly for our cohorts of interest, Black men and 26 According to the occupational income scores from Collins and Wanamaker (2022), the average annual income in 1940 among Black storekeepers, clergymen, and teachers was around 900, 700, and 800 dollars, respectively, relative to an average of 990 across all white-collar jobs (ranking them 39th, 68th, and 53rd out of 83 occupations). The average income among Black truck drivers was around 600 dollars, relative to an average of around 750 across all blue-collar jobs (ranking it 68th out of 92 occupations). ...
... The coefficients in Column (1) imply that Rosenwald exposure has a positive but statistically insignificant effect on the annual wage income of Black male wage workers. The estimates in Column (2), in which we impute income for farmers and self-employed workers using the occupational income scores from Collins and Wanamaker (2022), are similar. The estimates in Column (3), in which we further add occupation fixed effects, are consistent with the notion that the positive coefficients on wages primarily reflect within-occupation wage gains (though none of them are statistically significant). ...
This paper studies the labor market impact of the Rosenwald Schools Initiative, a school construction program in the early twentieth-century South. Using a new sample linking Social Security and census records, we find that exposure to Rosenwald schools raised Black women’s labor force participation and occupational standing in 1940; however, we find little evidence that Black men’s occupational standing significantly improved. Blacks made no discernible gains in jobs where they were underrepresented, while the gains they achieved were concentrated in jobs where they were commonly found. This suggests that the scope for Black occupational advancement was limited around 1940.
... Finally, the paper contributes to the broad literature on intergenerational mobility in American history (inter alia, Aaronson and Mazumder 2008;Long and Ferrie 2013;Olivetti and Paserman 2015;Bleakley and Ferrie 2016;Ager, Boustan, and Eriksson 2019;Tan 2023), including work that specifically addresses racial differences (Hertz 2005;Mazumder 2014;Collins and Wanamaker 2022;Derenoncourt 2022;Jácome, Kuziemko, and Naidu 2022;Ward 2023). It deepens these literatures by providing new insights into the economic outcomes of formerly enslaved men and women and their children, with unprecedented detail on variation 5 Specifically, we construct a dataset with national coverage for perspective on overall Black-White gaps, we examine a wide range of intergenerational outcomes, we compare sons of farmers of all tenure statuses and sons of men in other occupational categories, and we provide insight on whether status transmission was centered within households as opposed to variation in local characteristics. ...
... 11 Based on their ages and places of birth, the vast majority of the sample's Black sons were born free to previously enslaved parents-this is essentially the first generation of post-emancipation young Black men. Some of the data described here are derived from Collins and Wanamaker (2022), but with additional transcription from the agricultural census manuscripts and much more analysis of farm-level data in 1880 to glean insights into this critical period. In 1880, we can observe parents' occupation, race, age, and location; we cannot observe homeownership or literacy in this sample. ...
... Income Rank: A supplementary measure of labor market outcomes is the son's occupational income rank. This is based on a methodology described in full in Collins and Wanamaker (2022), which takes account of detailed occupations, race, and region. 18 For farming sons, our income assignments were differentiated based on homeownership status in 1900. ...
Large and persistent racial disparities in land-based wealth were an important legacy of the Reconstruction era. To assess how these disparities were transmitted intergenerationally, we build a dataset to observe Black households’ landholdings in 1880 alongside a sample of White households. We then link sons from all households to the 1900 census records to observe their economic and human capital outcomes. We show that Black landowners, relative to laborers, transmitted substantial intergenerational advantages to their sons, particularly in literacy and homeownership. However, such advantages were small relative to the racial gaps in measures of economic status.
... Dylan Connor and Michael Storper (2020) 2. Occupational scores and occupational ranks can be constructed in a variety of ways. We develop occupational scores following William Collins and Marianne Wanamaker (2022), and thus our estimates for occupational ward intergenerational mobility both across cohorts and within cohorts across space. Relative intergenerational mobility measures how an individual's outcomes relate to their parents' outcomes and captures the fluidity of social class. ...
... In panel A, we estimate intergenerational occupational mobility by regressing a child's occupational rank (husband's occupational rank, if women) on father's occupational rank and allow the rank-rank coefficient to change by child's birth year. Occupational ranks are based on the national distribution of occupational income scores created by Collins and Wanamaker (2022). In panel B, we estimate educational mobility by regressing a child's years of schooling on father's years of schooling and also allow the residing with their husbands, a natural question is whether findings are sensitive to this sample restriction. ...
... Note: This table reports the estimated effects of the Great Depression on intergenerational persistence (mobility is the opposite) in occupation and education. The dependent variables in columns 1 through 3 are occupational ranks in a national distribution, based on the occupational scores (Collins and Wanamaker 2022). The occupational scores are based on average earned income by occupation, race, and region and adjusted for farmers' incomes according to farm size. ...
This article examines the role of the Great Depression in shaping the intergenerational mobility of some of the most upwardly mobile cohorts of the twentieth century. Using newly linked census and vital records from the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database, we examine the occupational and educational mobility of more than 265,000 sons and daughters born in Ohio and North Carolina. We find that the deepest and most protracted downturn in U.S. history had limited effects on sons’ intergenerational mobility but reduced daughters’ intergenerational mobility.
... In recent years, however, new levels of computing power along with document digitization have enabled to push the boundaries to automate (part of) the process, reducing the costs of data assembling in favor of more resources for the analytical part of a study (Ruggles, Fitch, and Roberts 2018). Numerous studies have furthered the scope of economic history (Collins and Wanamaker 2017;Feigenbaum 2018;Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2014;Pérez 2017), albeit focusing on the more developed areas of today's world. The DWI project is the first to systematically link individuals across different sources for a territory in the "Global South". ...
... However, the definition of individuals is what marks the difference between these panels and the DWI: in the DWI panel, as in all slave-based societies, slaves were not considered as individuals, but only as wealth. Only with emancipation would this distinction, at least legally, disappear.The DWI panel differs substantially from the historical datasets available for North America, in that the latter build upon a single source of data, census data, mostly concerned with demographics (The demography Canadian Linked Census Data -Antonie et al. 2020; 2022;, the American intergenerational linked census dataset -Collins and Wanamaker 2017;Collins, Holtkamp, and Wanamaker 2022). Compared to these datasets, the DWI panel links data more often than just once per decade, thanks to the use of tax records along with census data. ...
In this article, we discuss the sources employed and the methodological choices that entailed assembling a novel, individual-level, large panel dataset containing an incredible wealth of data for a full population in the Caribbeans over the long run, the DWI panel. The panel contains over 1.35 million observations spanning 154 years, well over 100 variables, and its records are linked across sources along demographic and geographic lines throughout the entire period. This richness is all the more valuable in light of the limited source's availability characteristics of the area and is hoped to lead to a renewed debate over our understanding of former slave societies, while fostering collaborations with scholars relying on similar datasets for other areas of the world.
JEL: D31, F54, J47, N01, N36,
... On the other hand, the Black population share is the most powerful predictor of IM in the US (Connor & Storper, 2020). Black people have lower IM (Chetty et al., 2020;Collins & Wanamaker, 2017;Davis & Mazumder, 2018), and IM is lower for all races in places with a larger share of Black people (Connor & Storper, 2020;Ryabov, 2020). However, the mechanisms behind these two channels are rarely studied and still not well understood. ...
... There are two possible explanations for this correlation. One is compositional: Black people have lower IM than White people (Chetty et al., 2020;Collins & Wanamaker, 2017;Davis & Mazumder, 2018), so areas with a high concentration of Black people have lower IM, which is the individual race effect. Another is that places with more Black people have poorer IM for all races (Chetty et al., 2014;Connor & Storper, 2020;Ryabov, 2020), which is the neighborhood race effect. ...
This study examines the mechanisms of spatial variation in intergenerational mobility (IM) in United States (US) counties. We explicitly emphasized the effects of urban space and four aspects of urban sprawl-density, mix of uses, centering, and accessibility-and their interaction with socioeconomic factors. We found that urban sprawl variables did not all affect IM in the same direction, and the magnitude of the effect of one urban sprawl variable depended on other variables. The effects of centering varied: while employment centering negatively affected IM, population centering enhanced IM. Typical livable city indicators of walkability, mixed-use development, and a jobs-housing balance improved IM. Their effects on IM were magnified if either of the other two factors increased. However, the impact of walkability on IM decreased if employment centering increased and vice versa. Urban sprawl variables also indirectly influenced IM through inequality, segregation, social capital, and unemployment. We also found that the Black population share had the largest indirect and total effects on IM, which were spatially stationary across the US, and were mediated by racial segregation, social capital, unemployment , education, and single parenthood. This study has shown that enhancing IM requires more than reducing segregation and increasing density.
... I use the 1880Borjas ( , 1910Borjas ( , and 1940 See Black and Devereaux (2011) for a review of intergenerational studies and Solon (2018) for multigenerational studies. There are many other historical studies that estimate heterogeneity in two-generation mobility across geography, during economic shocks, or for different subgroups based on sex or race (e.g., Ager, Boustan, and Eriksson 2019;Bleakley and Ferrie 2016;Clark 2014;Chetty et al. 2017;Collins and Wanamaker 2017;Feigenbaum 2015;Feigenbaum 2018;Hilger 2016;Kosack and Ward 2019;Long and Ferrie 2013;Olivetti and Paserman 2015;Perez 2018;Tan 2018). multiple generations such that being part of a group (i.e., an ethnicity) matters for the grandson's occupation. ...
... While the magnitude of convergence rates varies by occupational income score, the main result holds where ethnic differentials converged at least twice as slowly as predicted by a standard multigenerational model. For example, if one allows for regional variation in occupational income, as in the income score created by Collins and Wanamaker (2017), then convergence of ethnic means appears to be three times slower than the grandfather-grandson estimate, and the magnitude of persistence was much higher than for my preferred occupational score. This result could be because occupational income does not capture the persistence of income due to ethnicities living in higher or lower income areas. ...
How persistent are economic gaps across ethnicities? The convergence of ethnic gaps through the third generation of immigrants is difficult to measure because few datasets include grandparental birthplace. I overcome this limitation with a new three-generational dataset that links immigrant grandfathers in 1880 to their grandsons in 1940. I find that the persistence of ethnic gaps in occupational income is 2.5 times stronger than predicted by a standard grandfather-grandson elasticity. While part of the discrepancy is due to measurement error attenuating the grandfather-grandson elasticity, mechanisms related to geography also partially explain the stronger persistence of ethnic occupational differentials. (JEL J15, J22, J31, J51)
... This differential representation matters to the extent that different groups have heterogeneous intergenerational income elasticities. For instance, they may differ between whites and blacks (Duncan 1968, Margo 2016, Collins and Wanamaker 2016 or farmers and non-farmers (Hout andGuest 2013, Xie andKillewald 2013). If less mobile groups are over-represented in the linked data, this would tend to overstate estimates of π and understate the historical rate of intergenerational mobility. ...
... Early Indicators Oldest Old Sample of Union Army VeteransThe Oldest Old sample of Union Army veterans from the Early Indicators project provides another ground truth sample. Using genealogical methods and a rich set of supplementary information,Costa et al. (2017) created this oversample of 2,096 individuals at least 95 years old linked to the 1900 complete count Census. These veterans tended to report very complete and accurate information to ensure they would receive their army pensions and benefits. ...
This dissertation explores questions on the substance and methods of economic history. Chapter one studies a little-known policy change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explore the causal effects of political exclusion on the economic wellbeing of immigrants. Starting in the mid-19th century, twenty-four states and territories expanded their electorates to allow non-citizen immigrants the right to vote; from 1864-1926, however, these same jurisdictions reversed this policy, creating a mass disenfranchisement for which the timing varied across states. Using this variation as well as a discontinuity in nationalization proceedings of the era, I find that political exclusion led to a 25-60% reduction in the likelihood that affected immigrants obtained public sector employment. I also document significant negative intergenerational effects: individuals of immigrant parentage born around the time of disenfranchisement earned 5-9% less as adults than comparable individuals of native parentage. I am able to rule out as mechanisms for this intergenerational effect a variety of policy and spending channels, but find evidence for a reduction in English-language proficiency among disenfranchised immigrants, which may have adversely affected the human capital of their children. Chapter two explores the causes of the adoption and repeal of alien voting in the United States. This policy shift offers a valuable opportunity to understand the forces determining political inclusion and exclusion in a formative period of American democracy, and contributes to the broader literature on theories of democratization. I use qualitative evidence from the historical record to outline competing theories of both adoption and repeal of alien voting, and then rationalize these hypotheses within the context of a median voting model. Using a discrete time hazard specification, I find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that states used alien voting as a locational amenity, with the objective of inducing immigrant in-migration in order to foster agricultural development. The results indicate that the timing of repeal was driven by social costs, rather than economic or political factors, although there is evidence for heterogeneity in correlates of support for repeal across states. Finally, the costs of constitutional change were salient for both adoption and repeal: states for which it was less costly to re-write or amend the constitution were more likely to adopt and repeal alien voting. Chapter three is a co-authored methodological study intended to assess the efficacy of commonly used techniques to create name-linked historical datasets. The recent digitization of historical microdata has led to a proliferation of research using linked data, in which researchers use various methods to match individuals across datasets by observable characteristics; less is known, however, about the quality of the data produced using those different methods. Using two hand-linked ground-truth samples, we assess the performance of four automated linking methods and two commonly used name-cleaning algorithms. Results indicate that automated methods result in high rates of false matches – ranging from 17 to over 60 percent – and the use of phonetic name cleaning increases false match rate by 60-100 percent across methods. We conclude by exploring the implications of erroneous matches for inference, and estimate intergenerational income elasticities for father-son pairs in the 1940 Census using samples generated by each method. We find that estimates vary with linking method, suggesting that caution must be used when interpreting parameters estimated from linked data.
... Note that the 1940 census does not record farm income. We compute income for farmers following Collins and Wanamaker (2022) prediction. Both IRO participants and other residents of Jewish enclaves have similarly Jewishly-identified names according to our Jewish Names Index (index = 1.83 -1.84), whereas Jews who lived in other parts of New York City or in the rest of the country had less Jewishly-identified names (index = 1.76 -1.77). ...
The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outside of an enclave. Participants were more likely to speak English, and married spouses with less Jewish names. More Jewishly-identified men (as measured by own names) were more likely to return to the city. We contextualize these results with new national evidence on Jewish economic and cultural assimilation.
... Such disparities are specially profound between White and Black communities in the United States (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) despite years of implementing anti-discriminatory initiatives including race-sensitive policies such as affirmative action (Holzer and Neumark, 2000) and race-blind policies such as Earned Income Tax Credit (Ajilore, 2008) or Child Tax Credit (Goldin and Michelmore, 2020). Furthermore, the wealth gap between these two communities has widened in recent decades as white households have predominantly benefited from intergenerational mobility (Collins and Wanamaker, 2022) and capital gains (Derenoncourt et al, 2022). As a result, the racial inequality has found ramifications, in terms of racial and ethnic disparities, in all parts of the American life including criminal justice (Sampson and Lauritsen, 1997) and public health (Nazroo, 2003). ...
Reparations in terms of direct payments are often used to redress injustices and compensate for historical inequalities. In some parts of the United States, restoring the deferred wealth of Black population through reparations has gained traction in recent years. However, there is no consensus on which reparative policies should be implemented and how to assess their potential impact. Here we show that reparative taxation of White population can be an effective measure in closing the racial wealth gap. We found that imposing a hypothetical one-time reparative estate tax of 5% can potentially close the racial wealth gap among all skill groups (high-skilled, low-skilled, and combined). However, the impact of such reparation shock on closing the wealth gap between high-skilled and low-skilled labor can be observed only among Black population. Nevertheless, the impact of imposing a similar one-time reparative inheritance tax of 5% is less profound in closing the racial wealth gap. Overall, the low-skilled Black sub-population emerges as the group benefiting the most from these hypothetical taxation schemes. These results show how reparation policies in the form of taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers can help close the racial wealth gap while having a short-lived impact on the skill-based wealth gap. The structural economic model of overlapping generations proposed in this paper can be considered a stepping stone to the incorporation of intergenerational and interracial inequalities into the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs).
JEL Classification: J15 , D63 , D31
... For Black individuals, longterm longitudinal studies show that gaps in intergenerational mobility in striving and thriving have proved stubbornly persistent with large Black-White gaps in both upward and downward mobility across generations. [4][5][6][7][8] ...
... Supplementing these public infrastructure projects, entrepreneurial researchers have also combined large datasets. See, for example, Abramitzky, Platt Boustan, and Eriksson (2012, 2014, Boustan, Kahn, and Rhode (2012), Hornbeck and Naidu (2014);Mill (2013); Mill and Stein (2016), Aizer, Eli, Ferrie, and Lleras-Muney (2016), Bleakley and Ferrie (2014;, Nix and Qian (2015), Collins and Wanamaker (2016), and Eli, Salisbury, and Shertzer (2016). ...
My dissertation examines the economic links between people's experiences in early and later-life. It offers new empirical evidence on the effect of income in infancy on later-life outcomes, and investigates the performance and econometric properties of the linking tools often used to create data for these long-term empirical investigations. In my first chapter, I estimate a relationship between family income in infancy and later-life outcomes for children. Eligibility for child-related tax benefits depends on the calendar year in which a child is born. Families with children born in December are eligible for tax benefits a year earlier than families with children born a few days later in January. These differences create a discontinuity in after-tax income in infancy worth on average approximately 1,000 increase in after-tax income in infancy results in a 1.2 percentage point increase in the probability of a student being grade-for-age by high school, a basic indicator of academic achievement and social maturity. Effects of this income shock are larger for children from families that are more likely disadvantaged at a child's birth, including Black families, and families with low education attainment. After high school, small differences in labor force attachment, earnings and education attainment persist for the adults who experienced the income increase as children. These effects are again pronounced for Black adults and adults born in counties with low average education attainment. In my second and third chapters, I investigate methodological problems that arise when linking data. Linking is often necessary to investigate generational economic links between childhood and adulthood. In the second chapter, my coauthors Martha Bailey, Catherine Massey, Morgan Henderson and I review the literature in historical record linkage in the U.S., and examine the performance of widely-used automated record linking algorithms. Focusing on algorithms in current practice, our findings highlight the important effects of linking methods on data quality. We then extend our analysis to look at the consequences of these differences in data quality on inference by computing intergenerational income elasticities between fathers and sons. Many of the methods produce estimated elasticities that are statistically distinguishable from the estimated intergenerational elasticity with hand-linked data, suggesting that the linking algorithms themselves may bias inference. However, eliminating false matches renders elasticity estimates similar to each other, and statistically indistinguishable from the elasticity estimated with the hand-linked data. In the third chapter, my coauthors Martha Bailey, Catherine Massey and I investigate two complementary strategies to address the issues we highlight in my second chapter. We investigate the use of validation variables to identify higher quality links and a regression-based weighting procedure to increase the representativeness of custom research samples. We demonstrate the potential value of these strategies using the 1850-1930 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series Linked Representative Samples (IPUMS-LRS). We show that, while incorrect linking rates appear low in the IPUMS-LRS, researchers can reduce error rates further using validation variables. We also show researchers can reweight linked samples to balance observed characteristics in the linked sample with those in a reference population using a simple regression-based procedure.
This article estimates several causal counterfactual parameters of the effect of being an Historically Black College/University (HBCU) on college/university endowment, and on the probability of a college/university failing as a function of its financial health, which is proportional to endowment. Our various counterfactual causal parameter decomposition estimates suggest that the racial distinctiveness of HBCUs causes, and can account for cumulative HBCU/non-HBCU endowment disparities between 58.9 billion for the HBCUs in our estimating sample. This is consistent with, at least in part, racial discrimination against HBCUs in philanthropic endowment contributions/gifts. With respect to failure, as HBCU status contributes to higher failure probabilities that are a function of college/university financial health, reducing the HBCU/non-HBCU endowment disparity would also enhance the ability of HBCUs to continuously exist. We suggest two public policy interventions to close the endowment disparity. First, increase the tax subsidy for contributions/gifts to HBCUs relative to non-HBCUs, as a way to incentivize more gifts to HBCUs from wealthy foundations and individuals. Secondly, to the extent that the wealth of HBCU alumni—who give back to their alma mater at higher rates than their non-HBCU peers—has been constrained due to the legacy of Slavery and discrimination, a distribution of reparations to the descendants of Black American Slaves would close Black-White wealth disparities that could translate into larger endowment contributions/gifts from HBCU alumni.
Applying the tenets of QuantCrit, longitudinal trends in estimated graduate school enrollment percentages for Black and White students from 2002 to 2018 were analyzed and compared using U.S. Department of Education data. While the statistical analyses for Black students confirmed a positive linear trend, the relatively recent downward movement from 2012 to 2018 is concerning. Considering the recent SCOTUS decision to eliminate any consideration of race from college admission standards, we should closely monitor the enrollment of Black students in graduate programs.
This article studies the long-run effects of government-led construction of manufacturing plants on the regions where they were built and on individuals from those regions. Specifically, we examine publicly financed plants built in dispersed locations outside of major urban centers for security reasons during the U.S. industrial mobilization for World War II. Wartime plant construction had large and persistent effects on local development, characterized by an expansion of relatively high-wage manufacturing employment throughout the postwar era. These benefits were shared by incumbent residents; we find men born before World War II in counties where plants were built earned $1,200 (in 2020 dollars) or 2.5% more per year in adulthood relative to those born in counterfactual comparison regions, with larger benefits accruing to children of lower-income parents. The balance of evidence suggests that these individuals benefited primarily from the local expansion of higher-wage jobs to which they had access as adults, rather than because of developmental effects from exposure to better environments during childhood.
Farm succession is a central issue in agricultural policy. Yet although many studies explore succession planning, little is known about how farms are actually transferred. We provide the first population‐level evidence on intergenerational farm succession by linking US census records for millions of farmers' children in 1900 and 1910 to identify which children own and operate the family farm up to 40 years later. We first show that daughters are rarely successors. Using a within‐family identification strategy, we find that first‐born sons are slightly more likely than their younger brothers to be successors while their parents are working aged. However, birth order is not predictive of who receives the farm when parents are older or deceased. For later farm transfers, sons who were previously tenant farmers are much more likely than their brothers to be successors, possibly because they are better prepared. Fewer than one‐fifth of farmers transfer their farm to any son. Our study relies on rich historical data because current policy prevents the necessary data linkages for studying intergenerational farm succession. Providing a secure system for researchers to link modern agricultural data to population microdata, similar to what has been achieved with other data sources, would yield crucial insights into long‐term agricultural policy issues in the US.
Attempts to measure social mobility before the twentieth century are frequently hampered by limited data. In this paper, we use a new source – annual, matched tax censuses over more than 70 years – to calculate intragenerational income mobility within a preindustrial, settler society, the Dutch and British Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. Our unique source allows us to measure income mobility along several dimensions, helping to disentangle reasons for the high levels of persistence we find.
Presumed competent, Asian Americans exhibit the highest level of education and median household income of all major US ethnoracial groups. On average, they outpace all groups in the domain of education, yet they do not maintain their advantage in the labor market. The question of bias against Asian Americans has taken center stage in the most recent US Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, but the attention has been on university admissions. We broaden the focus and rewrite the question to consider how Asian Americans seek to preempt bias in the labor market by strategically adapting to mitigate it. Strategic adaptation begins with precollege education, continues with college choice and major, and entails acquiring elite credentials that signal hard skills and merit. The strategy falls short of obviating bias altogether, however. We show how Asian Americans’ labor market earnings and mobility vary by gender, nativity, national origin, place of education, and field of study.
Recent studies use names—first and surnames—to estimate intergenerational mobility in sources that lack direct family links. While generating novel evidence on intergenerational transmission processes, it remains unclear how different estimators compare and how reliable they are. This paper evaluates the most popular name-based methods, using newly digitised records from Finland and U.S. Census data. We illustrate that their interpretation depends on sampling properties of the data, such as the overlap between the parent and child samples, which differ widely across studies. We correct for the attenuation bias from limited overlap and address other common problems encountered in applications.
A large body of evidence finds that relative mobility in the US has declined over the past 150 years. However, long-run mobility estimates are usually based on White samples and therefore do not account for the limited opportunities available for nonwhite families. Moreover, historical data measure the father’s status with error, which biases estimates toward greater mobility. Using linked census data from 1850 to 1940, I show that accounting for race and measurement error can double estimates of intergenerational persistence. Updated estimates imply that there is greater equality of opportunity today than in the past, mostly because opportunity was never that equal. (JEL J15, J62, N31, N32)
The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios from 1860 to 2020, drawing on historical census data, early state tax records, and historical waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances, among other sources. Incorporating these data into a parsimonious model of wealth accumulation for each racial group, we document the role played by initial conditions, income growth, savings behavior, and capital returns in the evolution of the gap. Given vastly different starting conditions under slavery, racial wealth convergence would remain a distant scenario, even if wealth-accumulating conditions had been equal across the two groups since Emancipation. Relative to this equal-conditions benchmark, we find that observed convergence has followed an even slower path over the last 150 years, with convergence stalling after 1950. Since the 1980s, the wealth gap has widened again as capital gains have predominantly benefited white households, and convergence via income growth and savings has come to a halt.
The literature on intergenerational income mobility uses a diverse set of measures and there is limited knowledge about whether these measures provide similar information and yield similar conclusions. We provide a framework to highlight the key concepts and properties of the different estimators. We then show how these measures relate to one another empirically. Our main analysis uses income tax data from Australia to produce a comprehensive set of empirical estimates for each of 19 different mobility measures at both the national and regional levels. We supplement this analysis with other data that uses either within- or between-country variation in mobility measures. A key finding is that there is a clear distinction between relative and absolute measures both conceptually and empirically. A region may be high with respect to absolute mobility but could be low with respect to relative mobility. However, within broad categories, the different mobility measures tend to be highly correlated. For rank-based estimators, we highlight the importance of how the choice of the distribution used for calculating ranks can play a critical role in determining its properties as well as affect empirical findings. These patterns of results are important for policymakers whose local economy might fare well according to some mobility indicators but not others. (JEL D31, H24, I32, J62)
Whether immigrants advance in labor markets during their lifetimes relative to natives is a fundamental question in the economics of immigration. We examine linked census records for five cohorts spanning 1850–1940, when immigration to the United States was at its peak. We find a U-shaped pattern of assimilation: immigrants were “catching up” to natives in the early and later cohorts, but not in between. This change was not due to shifts in immigrants’ source countries. Instead, it was rooted in men’s early-career occupations, which we associate with structural change, strengthening complementarities, and large immigration waves in the 1840s and 1900s. (JEL J15, J24, J61, J82, N31, N32)
Growth in per pupil education spending in the United States was mostly flat until 1918, after which it increased by almost 100% in a brief six-year period. This is the fastest documented increase in per pupil education spending in U.S. history. Using newly digitized biennial data on 386 of the largest urban school systems in the U.S. from 1900 to 1930, I investigate the origins of this spending increase. I first document that there was significant expansion in all spending and revenue categories with particularly large increases in capital expenditures which were likely financed through borrowing. My results suggest that state education policies were largely ineffective in increasing school resources, as laws increasing state aid to local districts crowded out local receipts while compulsory schooling and English-only laws were not accompanied by increases in receipts or expenditures per pupil. Rather, I find that substantial increases in educational spending per pupil were linked to women's suffrage. Providing women with the right to vote can explain about 20% of the increase in per pupil spending from 1900 to 1930.
Opioid misuse is a growing public health concern in the United States (U.S.). This problem continues to claim many lives and has affected the life expectancy of the U.S. population. In the past few years, the Black population has witnessed an increased rate of overdose deaths compared to their white counterparts. This review seeks to characterize recent trends in opioid prescription practices and overdose deaths among the Black population in the U.S. An integrative review was conducted with a literature search from CINHAL, MEDLINE, and PsycINFO databases. The literature search identified 11 articles for the analysis. All studies were quantitative. Six studies focused on overdose mortality and five on opioid prescription practices. The results indicate a rising trend in opioid overdose mortality among Black people due to the availability of synthetic opioids on the illegal drug market. Black people receive fewer opioid prescriptions and experience higher rates of opioid dose reduction compared to Whites. The Black population has experienced an increase in opioid overdose mortality compared to the White population within the last two decades. Opioid overdose deaths among Black people are highly associated with the proliferation of synthetic opioids, and Black men have been more affected than Black women. Black people experience lower rates of opioid prescription during E.R. visits compared to Whites. The issue of low opioid prescribing among Black people needs to be addressed since it affects their health outcomes and is a factor that contributes to the use of illicit synthetic opioids.
This paper studies how the expansion of segregated neighborhoods eroded black wealth in prewar American cities. Using a novel sample of matched addresses, we find that over a single decade rental prices soared by roughly 50 percent on city blocks that transitioned from all white to majority black. Meanwhile, pioneering black families paid a 28 percent premium to buy a home on a majority white block, after which their homes lost 10 percent of their value. These findings strongly suggest that segregated housing markets cost black families much of the gains associated with moving north during the Great Migration.
This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws of slavery, lynching, Negro Jobs, and the making of the Black ghetto. We highlight the life and writings of Alexander and other early African American economists as an example of the cost of racial exclusion in the economics profession and how it has impeded the production of useful knowledge about the workings of the US economy. (JEL J15, K38, N31, N32, N41, N42)
I study the rates of, selection into, and sorting of European immigrants’ secondary migration within the United States and their geographic assimilation during the Age of Mass Migration. These phenomena are recognized as important components of the economics of immigration, but data constraints have limited prior study of them in this context. As part of the debate over immigrant distribution, they were also major issues in the broader twentieth-century immigration policy debate, which was influenced by the widely held view that immigrants in the early twentieth century were less geographically mobile and specifically more attached to urban areas than were natives and earlier immigrants. I find that immigrants throughout the Age of Mass Migration were at least as likely as natives to make inter-county moves, were more attached to urban areas, were more likely to move to urban destinations, and shared natives’ increasing attachment to urban areas over time. In spite of their mobility, immigrants experienced relatively little assimilation in their place-of-residence distributions relative to natives with time in the United States, though they did experience somewhat more convergence on natives in terms of urbanization. These results help to better understand immigrant assimilation and the effects of immigration during the Age of Mass Migration and imply that the contemporary views of immigrant immobility were either false, oversimplified, or the product of changes in the US economy.
This article uses a linked sample of World War I Army veterans from the state of Missouri to study the impact of vocational rehabilitation on labor market outcomes for men wounded and disabled during the war. Veterans’ military service abstracts are linked to the 1940 US Census and a subset are linked to rehabilitation records. This creates a new dataset that contains information on military service, rehabilitation, and labor market outcomes. I find that 70 percent of veterans that were both wounded in action and disabled when discharged from the army participated in the rehabilitation program. These same veterans had significantly better labor market outcomes, which can be attributed to the rehabilitation program under certain assumptions.
We link newly digitized personnel records of the U.S. government for 1907–1921 to census data to study the segregation of the civil service by race under President Woodrow Wilson. Using a difference-in-differences design around Wilson’s inauguration, we find that the introduction of employment segregation increased the black-white earnings gap by 3.4–6.9 percentage points. This increasing gap is driven by a reallocation of existing black civil servants to lower-paid positions, lowering their returns to education. Importantly, the negative effects extend beyond Wilson’s presidency. Using census data for 1900–1940, we show that segregation caused a relative decline in the home ownership rate of black civil servants. Moreover, by comparing children of black and white civil servants in adulthood, we provide suggestive evidence that descendants of black civil servants who were exposed to Wilson’s presidency exhibit lower levels of education, earnings, and social mobility. Our combined results thus document significant short- and long-run costs borne by minorities during a unique episode of state-sanctioned discrimination.
This paper considers nonlinear measures of intergenerational income mobility such as (i) the effect of parents' permanent income on the entire distribution of their child's permanent income, (ii) transition matrices, and (iii) rank-rank correlations, among others. A central issue in the literature on intergenerational income mobility is that the researcher typically observes annual income rather than permanent income. Following the existing literature, we treat annual income as a measured-with-error version of permanent income. Studying these types of distributional effects, which are inherently nonlinear, while simultaneously allowing for measurement error requires developing new methods. In particular, we develop a new approach to studying distributional effects with "two-sided" measurement error -- that is, measurement error in both an outcome and treatment variable in a general nonlinear model. Our idea is to impose restrictions on the reduced forms for the outcome and the treatment separately, and then to show that these restrictions imply that the joint distribution of the outcome and the treatment is identified, and, hence, any parameter that depends on this joint distribution is identified -- this includes essentially all parameters of interest in the intergenerational mobility literature. Importantly, we do not require an instrument or repeated observations to obtain identification. These results are new, and this part of the paper provides an independent contribution to the literature on nonlinear models with measurement error. We use our approach to study intergenerational mobility using recent data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. Accounting for measurement error notably reduces various estimates of intergenerational mobility relative to estimates coming directly from the observed data that ignore measurement error.
This paper reviews the literature in historical record linkage in the United States and examines the performance of widely used record-linking algorithms and common variations in their assumptions. We use two high-quality, hand-linked data sets and one synthetic ground truth to examine the direct effects of linking algorithms on data quality. We find that (i) no algorithm (including hand linking) consistently produces representative samples; (ii) 15 to 37 percent of links chosen by widely used algorithms are classified as errors by trained human reviewers; and (iii) false links are systematically related to baseline sample characteristics, showing that some algorithms may introduce systematic measurement error into analyses. A case study shows that the combined effects of (i)–(iii) attenuate estimates of the intergenerational income elasticity by up to 29 percent, and common variations in algorithm assumptions result in greater attenuation. As current practice moves to automate linking and increase link rates, these results highlight the important potential consequences of linking errors on inferences with linked data. We conclude with constructive suggestions for reducing linking errors and directions for future research. (JEL C45, C81, J62, N31, N32)
We present new estimates of the outcomes of first-generation Mexicans and their descendants between 1880 and 1940. We find zero convergence of the economic gap between Mexicans and non-Mexican whites across three generations. The great-grandchildren of immigrants also had fewer years of education. Slow convergence is not simply due to an inheritance of poverty; rather, Mexican Americans had worse outcomes conditional on the father’s economic status. However, the gap between third-generation Mexican Americans and non-Mexican whites is about half the size today as it was in 1940, suggesting that barriers to Mexican American progress have significantly decreased over time.
We study the sources of racial disparities in income using anonymized longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989 to 2015. We document three results. First, black Americans and American Indians have much lower rates of upward mobility and higher rates of downward mobility than whites, leading to persistent disparities across generations. Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven by differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women. Hispanic Americans have rates of intergenerational mobility more similar to whites than blacks, leading the Hispanic-white income gap to shrink across generations. Second, differences in parental marital status, education, and wealth explain little of the black-white income gap conditional on parent income. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. The few areas with small black-white gaps tend to be low-poverty neighborhoods with low levels of racial bias among whites and high rates of father presence among blacks. Black males who move to such neighborhoods earlier in childhood have significantly better outcomes. However, less than 5% of black children grow up in such areas. Our findings suggest that reducing the black-white income gap will require efforts whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.
This book is an attempt to explain the origins of the political system Key described. A complex topic with wide ramifications, it has received less attention than it deserves. As Sheldon Hackney remarked in a recent review article, "One of the unsolved, even unposed riddles of twentieth-century southern politics is why a two-party system did not develop after disfranchisement." The solution to this riddle, I suggest, lies not in the period after disfranchisement and the establishment of the direct, statewide white primary, but in a study of the movements which sought to bring about those electoral changes. If so, then questions about the genesis of the electoral changes are important to political scientists and historians investigating not only the nineteenth century but also the twentieth. I have attempted in this book to cover in detail the movements for suffrage restriction in each of the eleven ex-Confederate states. I have also treated intensively the changes in Northern opinion toward suffrage and the South, the identity and objectives of the restrictionists and their opponents, and the purposes and efficacy of the particular alterations in the political rules. My interpretation of the change from the post-Reconstruction Southern political system to the twentieth-century system rests on a thorough analysis of election statistics using a technique heretofore rarely used by historians—Leo Goodman's ecological regression method. By employing Goodman's method, I have been able to obtain estimates of the percentages of blacks and whites who voted for each candidate, as well as the proportion who did not vote, in every presidential and gubernatorial election and in many primaries and referenda in the South from 1880 to 1910. For most of these elections, these are the first estimates based on a relatively sophisticated statistical procedure that have ever been made. These statistics allow the most firmly based answers that we have so far to such questions as: to what extent did blacks and whites, respectively, favor the Populists? What percentage of voters from each party favored disfranchisement in the various referenda? To what extent did the massive declines in votes turnout represent only the disfranchisement of blacks? To what extent did whites also stop voting?
More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, black–white family income disparities in the United States remain almost exactly the same as what they were in 1968. This article argues that a key and underappreciated driver of the racial income gap has been the national trend of rising income inequality. From 1968 to 2016, black–white disparities in family income rank narrowed by almost one-third. But this relative gain was negated by changes to the national income distribution that resulted in rapid income growth for the richest—and most disproportionately white—few percentiles of the country combined with income stagnation for the poor and middle class. But for the rise in income inequality, the median black–white family income gap would have decreased by about 30 percent. Conversely, without the partial closing of the rank gap, growing inequality alone would have increased the racial income gap by 30 percent.
Estimates of the most common mobility measure, the intergenerational elasticity, can be severely biased if snapshots are used to approximate lifetime income. However, little is known about biases in other popular dependence measures. Using long Swedish income series, we provide such evidence for log-linear and rank correlations, and rank-based transition probabilities. Attenuation bias is considerably weaker in rank-based measures. Life-cycle bias is strongest in the elasticity, moderate in log-linear correlations, and small in rank-based measures. However, there are important exceptions: persistence in the tails of the distribution is considerably higher and long-distance downward mobility lower than estimates from short-run income suggest. © 2017 by the Board of Regents of the University ofWisconsin System.
We use new estimators of directional rank mobility developed by Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011) to compare rates of upward and downward intergenerational mobility across three countries: Canada, Sweden and the United States. These measures overcome some of the limitations of traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity, which are not well suited for analyzing directional movements or for examining differences in mobility across the income distribution. Data for each country include highly comparable, administrative data sources containing sufficiently long time spans of earnings. Our most basic measures of directional mobility, which simply compare whether sons moved up or down in the earnings distribution relative to their fathers, do not differ much across the countries. However, we do find that there are clear differences in the extent of the movement. We find larger cross-country differences in downward mobility from the top of the distribution than upward mobility from the bottom. Canada has the most downward mobility while the U.S. has the least, with Sweden in the middle. We find some differences in upward mobility but these are somewhat smaller in magnitude. An important caveat is that our analysis may be sensitive to the concept of income we use and broader measures such as family income could lead to different conclusions. Also, small differences in rank mobility translate into rather large differences in absolute mobility measured in dollars, due to large differences in income inequality across countries.
Though the geographic, occupational, and financial mobility of average Americans were important aspects of nineteenth century U.S. economic development, the extent and correlates of this economic mobility have remained open to debate in the absence of individual- level longitudinal data. This essay describes a new sample of 4,938 individuals linked from the 1850 Public Use Micro Sample of the federal census of population to the 1860 federal census manuscript schedules, using the new national 1860 federal census index. The linked sample provides information on occupation, wealth, family structure, and location in both 1850 and 1860. The construction of the sample is described in detail, along with tests of its representativeness, and examples of potential uses.
We review theories of race discrimination in the labor market. Taste-based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread, but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential. Models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of wage differentials but do not address employment and unemployment. At their current state of development, models of statistical discrimination based on rational stereotypes have little empirical content. It is plausible that models combining elements of the search models with statistical discrimination could fit the data. We suggest possible avenues to be pursued and comment briefly on the implication of existing theory for public policy.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
We discuss research on discrimination against blacks and other racial minorities in labor market outcomes, highlighting fundamental challenges faced by empirical work in this area. Specifically, for work devoted to measuring whether and how much discrimination exists, we discuss how the absence of relevant data, the potential noncomparability of blacks and whites, and various conceptual concerns peculiar to race may frustrate or render impossible the application of empirical methods used in other areas of study. For work seeking to arbitrate empirically between the two main alternative theoretical explanations for such discrimination as it exists, we distinguish between indirect analyses, which do not directly study the variation in prejudice or the variation in information, the mechanisms at the heart of the two types of models we review, and direct analyses, which are more recent and much less common. We highlight problems with both approaches. Throughout, we discuss recent work, which, the various challenges notwithstanding, permits tentative conclusions about discrimination. We conclude by pointing to areas that might be fruitful avenues for future investigation.
Do Supreme Court decisions matter? In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that railroad segregation laws were permissible under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1954 the Court𠆘s decision in Brown v. the Board of Education held that the same constitutional provision invalidated statutes segregating public schools How great an impact did judicial rulings such as Plessy and Brown have? How much did such Court decisions influence the larger world of race relations? In From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, Michael J. Klarman examines the social and political impact of the Supreme Court’s decisions involving race relations from Plessy, the Progressive Era, and the Interwar Period to World Wars I and II, Brown and the Civil Rights Movement. He explores the wide variety of consequences that Brown may have had--raising the salience of race issues, educating opinion, mobilizing supporters, energizing opponents of racial change. He concludes that Brown was ultimately more important for mobilizing southern white opposition to racial change than for encouraging direct-action protest. The decision created concrete occasions for violent confrontation--court ordered school desegregation and radicalized southern politics, leading to the election of politicians who calculated that violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations would win votes. It was such violence—vividly captured on television—that ultimately transformed northern opinion on race, leading to the enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in the mid 1960s. A fascinating investigation of the Supreme Court’s rulings on race, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, spells out in exhaustive detail the political and social context against which the Supreme Court Justices operate and the consequences of those decisions on the civil rights movement and beyond.
This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region’s racial upward mobility gap today. I identify northern Black share increases by interacting pre-1940 Black migrants’ location choices with predicted southern county out-migration. Locational changes, not negative selection of families, explain lower upward mobility, with persistent segregation and increased crime and policing as plausible mechanisms. The case of the Great Migration provides a more nuanced view of moving to opportunity when destination reactions are taken into account. (JEL H75, H76, J15, J62, K42, N32, R23)
The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage, performing a series of comparisons across methods and against hand linking. We have three main findings that lead us to conclude that automated methods perform well. First, a number of automated methods generate very low (less than 5 percent) false positive rates. The automated methods trace out a frontier illustrating the trade-off between the false positive rate and the (true) match rate. Relative to more conservative automated algorithms, humans tend to link more observations but at a cost of higher rates of false positives. Second, when human linkers and algorithms use the same linking variables, there is relatively little disagreement between them. Third, across a number of plausible analyses, coefficient estimates and parameters of interest are very similar when using linked samples based on each of the different automated methods. We provide code and Stata commands to implement the various automated methods. (JEL C81, C83, N01, N31, N32)
This paper reviews the literature in historical record linkage in the United States and examines the performance of widely used record-linking algorithms and common variations in their assumptions. We use two high-quality, hand-linked data sets and one synthetic ground truth to examine the direct effects of linking algorithms on data quality. We find that (i) no algorithm (including hand linking) consistently produces representative samples; (ii) 15 to 37 percent of links chosen by widely used algorithms are classified as errors by trained human reviewers; and (iii) false links are systematically related to baseline sample characteristics, showing that some algorithms may introduce systematic measurement error into analyses. A case study shows that the combined effects of (i)–(iii) attenuate estimates of the intergenerational income elasticity by up to 29 percent, and common variations in algorithm assumptions result in greater attenuation. As current practice moves to automate linking and increase link rates, these results highlight the important potential consequences of linking errors on inferences with linked data. We conclude with constructive suggestions for reducing linking errors and directions for future research. (JEL C45, C81, J62, N31, N32)
The earnings difference between white and black workers fell dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This paper shows that the expansion of the minimum wage played a critical role in this decline. The 1966 Fair Labor Standards Act extended federal minimum wage coverage to agriculture, restaurants, nursing homes, and other services which were previously uncovered and where nearly a third of black workers were employed. We digitize over 1,000 hourly wage distributions from Bureau of Labor Statistics industry wage reports and use CPS microdata to investigate the effects of this reform on wages, employment, and racial inequality. Using a cross-industry difference-in-differences design, we show that earnings rose sharply for workers in the newly covered industries. The impact was nearly twice as large for black workers as for white. Within treated industries, the racial gap adjusted for observables fell from 25 log points prereform to zero afterwards. We can rule out significant disemployment effects for black workers. Using a bunching design, we find no aggregate effect of the reform on employment. The 1967 extension of the minimum wage can explain more than 20% of the reduction in the racial earnings and income gap during the Civil Rights Era. Our findings shed new light on the dynamics of labor market inequality in the United States and suggest that minimum wage policy can play a critical role in reducing racial economic disparities.
Historical studies of labor markets frequently lack data on individual income. The occupational income score (OCCSCORE) is often used as an alternative measure of labor market outcomes. We consider the consequences of using OCCSCORE when researchers are interested in earnings regressions. We estimate race and gender earnings gaps in modern decennial Censuses as well as the 1915 Iowa State Census. Using OCCSCORE biases results towards zero and can result in estimated gaps of the wrong sign. We use a machine learning approach to construct a new adjusted score based on industry, occupation, and demographics. The new income score provides estimates closer to earnings regressions. Lastly, we consider the consequences for estimates of intergenerational mobility elasticities.
This article documents and explores black-white differences in US women's labor force participation, occupations, and wages from 1940 to 2014. It draws on closely related research on selection into the labor force, discrimination, and prelabor market characteristics, such as test scores, that are strongly associated with subsequent labor market outcomes. Both black and white women significantly increased their labor force participation in this period, with white women catching up to black women by 1990. Black-white differences in occupational and wage distributions were large circa 1940; they have narrowed significantly since then as black women's relative outcomes improved. Following a period of rapid convergence, the racial wage gap for women widened after 1980 in census data. Differences in human capital, which are rooted in the history of racial discrimination, are an empirically important underpinning of the black-white wage gap throughout the period studied.
Little evidence is available to assess the effect of substituting occupation-based income scores for individual incomes before 1940. The example of immigrant assimilation in Canada 1911–31 reveals differences in the extent and even the direction of assimilation depending on whether income scores are used and how the occupational income score is constructed. Given the increasingly wide use of income scores, we summarize a number of procedures to address the limitations associated with the absence of individual level income variation. An adjustment of conventional income scores for either group earnings differences and/or intertemporal change using summary information for broad groups of occupations reduces the deviation between scores and actual incomes.
We present new evidence on the evolution of black-white earnings differences among all men, including both workers and nonworkers. We study two measures: (i) the level earnings gap-the racial earnings difference at a given quantile; and (ii) the earnings rank gap-the difference between a black man's percentile in the black earnings distribution and the position he would hold in the white earnings distribution. After narrowing from 1940 to themid-1970s, the median black-white level earnings gap has since grown as large as it was in 1950. At the same time, the median black man's relative position in the earnings distribution has remained essentially constant since 1940, so that the improvement then worsening of median relative earnings have come mainly from the stretching and narrowing of the overall earnings distribution. Black men at higher percentiles have experienced significant advances in relative earnings since 1940, due mainly to strong positional gains among those with college educations. Large relative schooling gains by blacks at the median and below have been more than counteracted by rising return to skill in the labor market, which has increasingly penalized remaining racial differences in schooling at the bottom of the distribution. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
Was intergenerational economic mobility high in the early twentieth century in the US? Comparisons of mobility across time are complicated by the constraints of the data available. I match fathers from the Iowa State Census of 1915 to their sons in the 1940 Federal Census, the first state and federal censuses with data on income and years of education. I can estimate intergenerational mobility between 1915 and 1940 based on earnings, education, occupation, and names. Across all these measures, I document broad consensus that rates of persistence were low in Iowa in the early twentieth century.
Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twentieth century was not strictly driven by urbanization, black migration, or white flight: it resulted from increasing racial sorting at the household level. In all areas—North and South, urban and rural—segregation increased dramatically.
Competing explanations for the long-standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences. Using new data on local school quality, we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the South despite entrenched racial discrimination in civic life and the lack of federal employment protections. The resulting wage gap coincides with the higher end of the range of estimates from the post–Civil Rights era. We estimate that truly “separate but equal” schools would have reduced wage inequality by 29%–48%.
New benchmark estimates of Black-White income ratios for 1870, 1900, and 1940 are combined with standard post-World War census data. The resulting time series reveals that the pace of racial income convergence has generally been steady but slow, quickening only during the 1940s and the modern Civil Rights era. I explore the interpretation of the time series with a model of intergenerational transmission of inequality in which racial differences in causal factors that determine income are very large just after the Civil War and which erode slowly across subsequent generations.
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Economists and social scientists have long been interested in intergenerational mobility, and documenting the persistence between parents and children's outcomes has been an active area of research. However, since Gary Solon's 1999 Chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics, the literature has taken an interesting turn. In addition to focusing on obtaining precise estimates of correlations and elasticities, the literature has placed increased emphasis on the causal mechanisms that underlie this relationship. This chapter describes the developments in the intergenerational transmission literature since the 1999 Handbook Chapter. While there have been some important contributions in terms of measurement of elasticities and correlations, we focus primarily on advances in our understanding of the forces driving the relationship and less on the precision of the correlations themselves.
We use administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe three features
of intergenerational mobility in the United States. First, we characterize the joint distribution of parent and child income
at the national level. The conditional expectation of child income given parent income is linear in percentile ranks. On average,
a 10 percentile increase in parent income is associated with a 3.4 percentile increase in a child’s income. Second, intergenerational
mobility varies substantially across areas within the United States. For example, the probability that a child reaches the
top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9%
in San Jose. Third, we explore the factors correlated with upward mobility. High mobility areas have (i) less residential
segregation, (ii) less income inequality, (iii) better primary schools, (iv) greater social capital, and (v) greater family
stability. Although our descriptive analysis does not identify the causal mechanisms that determine upward mobility, the publicly
available statistics on intergenerational mobility developed here can facilitate research on such mechanisms. JEL Codes: H0, J0, R0.
The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migration? How large were the migrants' gains? Did migration narrow the racial gap in economic status? We find evidence of positive selection, but the migrants' gains were large. A substantial amount of black-white convergence in this period is attributable to migration.
William Julius Wilson argues that the gains in employment and occupational status that blacks made during the 1960s bred class cleavages that did not exist within the black population prior to 1960. This paper presents a new analysis of data on inter- and intragenerational mobility of black men from the OCG surveys of 1962 and 1973 that supports Wilson's argument. Three important class effects of the type hypothesized by Wilson are found. First, class effects on intragenerational mobility between 1962 and 1973 were significant for blacks; these class effects were similar to class effects among whites. Second, class differences in intergenerational mobility increased between 1962 and 1973. Finally, upward mobility between 1962 and 1973 was greatest among men from the most advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. The analysis also reveals an important role for public-sector employment in both occupational upgrading among black men and the emergence of class cleavages within the black population. The public sector provided more high- and middle-status occupations for black men than did the private sector. On the other hand, the public sector was more selective in recruiting blacks from middle class and skilled manual backgrounds than was the private sector.
Cutler and Glaeser (1997) show that urban residential segregation has a strong adverse effect on labor market and social outcomes of young African-Americans relative to whites. We show that this effect is a fairly recent historical phenomenon. There is little evidence of such an effect from 1940 to 1970; rather, it emerged between 1970 and 1980, and it grew stronger during the 1980s.
The occupational socioeconomic status of men in the experienced civilian labor force (ECLF) rose between 1962 and 1973, and black men gained more than whites. Although the racial gap narrowed over the decade, black men in 1973 had not matched the occupational standing of white men in 1962. Intercohort changes in schooling and, to a lesser degree, changes in family background account for some of the shifts. Changes in the effects of schooling and of social background have occurred, and these differ between the races. Among white men in the ECLF, family factors are less important in occupational allocation than they were a decade ago; schooling has increased in importance relative to family background; both the effect of schooling on occupational standing and educational level of occupational incumbents have increased. In contrast, among black men in the ECLF, family factors were more tightly linked with occupational achievement in 1973 than in 1962, and black men with the same socioeconomic background and schooling held higher-status jobs in 1973 than in 1962. Among young workers, patterns of socioeconomic stratification do not differ by race as much as they did in previous years. Still, socioeconomic discrimination by race is prevalent, especially among workers with established work histories. We suggest that race and class have become less important in the processes which allocate men from families to schooling and subsequently to positions in the occupational hierarchy.
During the Age of Mass Migration, the US maintained open borders and absorbed 30 million European immigrants. Using cross-sectional data, prior work on this era finds that immigrants held lower-paid occupations than natives upon first arrival but experienced rapid convergence. In newly-assembled panel data following immigrants over time, the initial immigrant earnings penalty disappears almost entirely, and immigrants experience occupational upgrading at the same rate as natives. Cross-sectional patterns are driven by declines over time in arrival cohort quality and the departure of negatively-selected return migrants. We show that these findings vary substantially across sending countries and explore potential mechanisms.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This article studies the effect of recruitment restrictions on mobility and wages in the postbellum U.S. South. I estimate the effects of criminal fines charged for "enticement" (recruiting workers already under contract) on sharecropper mobility, tenancy choice, and agricultural wages. I find that a $13 (10%) increase in the enticement fine lowered the probability of a move by black sharecroppers by 12%, daily wages by 1 cent (.1%), and the returns to experience for blacks by 0.6% per year. These results are consistent with an on-the-job search model, where the enticement fine raises the cost of recruiting an employed worker. (c) 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved..
This article uses state and city level data to evaluate empirically Brinley Thomas's immigrant-as-deterrent view of the relationship between black emigration from the South and European immigration to the North. The article suggests a Todaro-like interpretation of the Great Migration, which emphasizes the importance of job availability to blacks in determining their expected wages. The combination of mass European immigration and hiring practices that favored white immigrants over blacks may have delayed the Great Migration by decades. The empirical work supports this view.