The degree to which labor markets are well integrated across space and occupation has important welfare and distributional consequences for workers1. This is especially true in the United States, where the economy having high occupational and geographic mobility are essential elements of the American story (Ferrie 2005). One version of this story is that a national labor market emerged in the United States after the Civil War. How this integration unfolded unevenly matters in understanding the evolution of different parts of the American economy2. Until recently economic historians have had to rely on uneven data and approaches to measure labor market integration (Kim 98). Common approaches involved comparing aggregate population and occupation trends over time or relied on myopic wage and price data to make inferences about larger regions (Rosenbloom 90). Today the availability of high-quality US census data at the individual level provides economic historians with new opportunities to better measure labor market integration (Abramitzky et al 2017). This paper uses a discrete version of the dynamic approach employed in Artuc and McLaren (2015) to measure switching costs faced by workers when moving between different locations or occupations. As labor markets become better integrated, these costs should approach zero. Studying the period between 1850 to 1880 and 1900 to 1940 decade by decade shows that the fixed costs of changing location or occupation increased between 1850 to 1880 and declined during the 20th century. Though direct comparisons of the two costs are not possible, the fixed costs of changing location fell roughly 15 percent while fixed costs of changing occupation fell roughly 25 percent. Even when a labor market is well integrated, the welfare gains depend on the details of this integration. One can imagine a labor market that may be well integrated because low-skilled workers face low switching costs when moving between low-skilled occupations or across locations but still face large hurdles when transitioning out of low-skilled work. To better measure occupational integration in the United States, additional costs for workers in low-skilled occupation groups when transitioning into the high-skilled occupation group are also estimated. These costs also decline through time, except for farmers whose costs of switching into high-skilled labor increase with time. In particular, the costs faced by unskilled workers transitioning into high-skilled work declined nearly 45 percent while the costs faced by farmers increased by 8 percent. This paper contributes to three strands of literature. The first is the literature already discussed above that focuses on quantifying labor market integration in the US during this period. This literature (Wright 1986, 1987, Rosenbloom 1990, Collins and Wannamaker 2015, and Mitchener and McLean 1998) highlight two commonly observed trends. The first is that labor market integration increased during this period. The second is that Southern labor markets were uniquely different from the rest of the country. The evidence supports the first point and potentially the second point since farmers faced higher costs, and the South had a greater share of workers in agriculture than other parts of the country. The second literature is one that includes the intersection of trade theory and American economic history. For example, Kim (1998) and Steinwender (2018) have taken trade theory to historical data to improve our understanding of important economic forces at the time. In addition, Artuc et al (2010) have generated models that are uniquely suited to the constraints of this historical setting. This paper provides another example of how these rich models can be combined with historical data to continue improving our understanding of the time period. The final literature this paper contributes to is one studying the effect of changes in migration patterns in the US. Abramitzky and Boustan (2017) summarize some of their and much of the other work done in this area, often using linked census data to measure immigrant outcomes. Ferrie (2005) and Salisbury (2014) focus on the effect of differential changes in migration rates across space, in particular declining rates of migration across state lines. Caselli and Coleman (2001) and Alston and Hatton (1991) highlight the impacts of the changing composition of the labor force during this period as agriculture lost its majority share of the workforce. This paper contributes to this literature as well by showing that these declining migration rates in conjunction with declining costs provide evidence of increasing labor market integration. This paper also shows that farmers faced statistically different costs compared to other groups when transitioning into high-skilled work.

In 1912, the last of the lower 48 states were admitted to the Union. New technology made it easier for people to move to areas previously avoided by most migrants and sustain new communities there. It also made it easier than ever to move goods across the country. However, some elements of economic integration seemed to lag behind. Scholars like Rosenbloom (2002) have long argued that regional labor markets, sufficiently separated from a national labor market, persisted through this period and even up to and through the Second World War. Studying how, why, and which labor markets remained isolated during this period helps us understand sources of push and pull forces responsible for increasing labor market integration in the United States. This paper combines newly collected data from the US Census of Manufactures for 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 with a new measure of labor market integration to better measure the frictions present in American regional labor markets and their implications for overall regional labor market integration. In the past, scholars like Wright (1987) and Rosenbloom (1990) have focused on using data on real wages and an appeal to a law of one price to measure labor market integration. The law of one price is an economic theory that economic historians have borrowed from trade economists and while it is possible to implement it successfully in a historical setting as in Steinwender (2018), the lack of good historical data often makes it a challenge to implement successfully. Usually a law of one price is invoked to measure the size of bilateral frictions in a market for a homogeneous good with reliable price data. One way to utilize a law of one price to measure labor market integration involves comparing real wages for the same occupation across different regions of the country. The literature has found that real wages did converge over time, but that there were persistent differences in real wages between some regions such as in Wright (1987). In particular, Mitchener & McLean (1999) find that Southern wages tended to be lower than the national average while Western wages tended to be higher. Based on these differences in real wages, the literature (Wright 1986), Rosenbloom 2002), Collins & Wannamaker 2015) have inferred the presence of significant labor market frictions and additional evidence has led to a focus on the unique facets of the Southern economy and the conclusion that the South possessed a labor market largely disconnected from the rest of the country. However, there are two reasons to believe that the strategy of inferring labor market frictions from real wages is not appropriate in this setting. The first reason is that we do not have reliable individual wage data before it was reported in the US Census starting in 1940. Even in newer publications like Salisbury (2014) and Abramitzky et al (2017), authors that want to incorporate wage data into their analysis before 1940 either have to rely on scattered data or rely on wage proxies. The second reason is that even if one can acquire enough wage data for a particular occupation or industry from a sufficiently large number of regions, the work that two individuals with the same occupation perform may be different enough to violate the law of one price assumption which requires the comparison of homogeneous labor market activity. Specifically, the concern is that even if we can control for region or industry-specific characteristics, there may be unobserved productivity differences that can bias estimation when using wages. Because of these limitations, this paper employs a regression specification from Bernard et al (2013) that relies on using a ratio of wage bills for different types of labor within an industry-region pair as the outcome variable in a law of one price regression rather than relying on incomplete wage data. However, wage bills may vary in competitive labor markets due to differences in the initial distribution of population. As in Bernard et al (2013), this paper uses a ratio of the wage bill for two types of workers: wage earners and salaried workers as the outcome variable to solve this problem. When using the ratio of two types of workers, any differences in endowed population at the region-industry level that would make a wage bill inappropriate to use for a law of one price regression are canceled. For ease of exposition, this ratio is referred to as a measure of skill premium since it measures the relative value each region-industry pair places on employing highly skilled (salaried) or low skilled (wage) labor. Because these wage bills are the product of labor demand and wages, unobserved productivity for each worker type can be controlled for. As with real wages, once the industrial composition within a state is controlled for, the law of one price argument states that any differences we observe in the average skill premium across regions are the result of labor market frictions since different types of workers would migrate to secure higher earnings in the absence of labor market frictions. In other words, once we control for the fact that Michigan had a larger share of its industrial composition in high skill premium industries like automobiles, and Wisconsin had a larger share of its industrial composition in lower skill premium industries like dairy, differences in state-level premium come from labor market frictions that prevent worker migration between skill levels, industries, and locations. The wage bill data by region and industry come from the US Census of Manufactures. While this paper is not the first to use these wage bill data, to my knowledge, this is the first paper to use data for the decadal years 1900-1940 inclusive that includes all of the recorded industrial activity instead of just focusing on the largest industries. These data were hand-recorded from scanned versions of the Census of Manufactures that are available for public access through the Census website. The data collected include all of the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia for 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 along with a panel of 44 cities described in the data section. These new data and the new measure used in this paper contribute directly to the literature on postbellum labor market integration in the US. However, these contributions are also relevant for the literature that has measured regional integration such as Kim (1998) that measure regional integration through non-wage channels. Other papers like Ferrie (2005) that have studied labor market integration with respect to different groups of workers, such as immigrants, can also benefit from these new data as controls to better understand push and pull forces that affect workers' decisions to relocate into different locations or occupations. With a simple OLS regression of the log of the wage bills against a full set of industry and state fixed effects, this paper finds two results about labor market integration in the United States. The first result is that labor market integration increased across the entire country between 1900 and 1940 as measured by the distribution of region fixed effects. This result is consistent with the existing narrative of labor market integration during this period. However, these increases were not smooth, and it appears that the increase in labor market integration took place between 1920 and 1930. The second result is that there is weak, if any, evidence of Southern labor markets being statistically different from any other regions. Neither the distribution, statistical significance, or magnitude of the region fixed effects support the idea that Southern labor markets included more labor market frictions than the rest of the country. The conclusions of this paper do not seek to overturn our understanding that there were differences in regional labor markets. Meaningful differences existed in 1900 and continued to exist in 1940. However, neighboring

This study explores the cultural legacy of slavery in the US South. I suggest the hypothesis that historical slave concentration fostered collectivism through post-Reconstruction policies, which strengthened group identification based on race. Consistent with this proposition, county-level evidence indicates the emergence of a negative link between slavery and individualism after Reconstruction. Beyond temporal coincidence , I use historical data on anti-enticement laws to examine the institutional mechanism of cultural change. Border-county analysis substantiates that the selective application of post-Reconstruction policies produced the relationship between slavery and collectivist culture.

We link personnel records of the federal civil service to census data for 1907-1921 to study the segregation of the civil service by race under President Woodrow Wilson. Using a difference-indifferences design to compare the black-white wage gap around Wilson's presidential transition, we find that the introduction of employment segregation increased the black wage penalty by 7 percentage points. This gap increases over time and is driven by a reallocation of already-serving black civil servants to lower paid positions. Our results thus document significant costs borne by minorities during a unique episode of state-sanctioned discrimination.

A prominent literature in political science holds that the meritocratic recruitment of public servants leads to gains in bureaucratic performance. It is also believed that this institution ought to also have positive eects on social cohesion, since the meritocratic distribution of civil service jobs theoretically enables members from all groups—ethnic minority or otherwise—to win coveted employment in the public sector. Looking predominantly at Southeast Asia, and drawing on large scale surveys and archival documents, this dissertation presents an argument and evidence to the contrary. Instead, under certain conditions, the introduction of meritocratic civil service reforms perpetuates existing inequalities, as privileged groups outperform marginalized groups on entrance exams and go on to sta administrative posts at disproportionately high rates, an outcome that heightens group-based resentment and weakens national solidarity. This dissertation develops its argument in the context of an important but understudied tension between the twinned goals of state-building and nation-building—a trade-o that comes most into focus in the Asian context. At the moment of independence, the leaders of Asian states faced the urgent task of state-building, which mostly involved recruiting a competent corps of public servants to sta the organs of their new governments. But these leaders were also tasked with nation-building to generate a sense of solidarity across their diverse populations. These twinned goals often existed—and continue to exist—in tension with one another. The most “competent” applicants for public service typically hailed from historically privileged groups who had received formal education: the forward castes in India, the Javanese in Indonesia, or the Chinese in Malaysia. A narrow focus on state-building would have led to a disproportionate representation of certain groups in the apparatus of the state, which would have surely detracted from the task of nation-building.

We address three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories ('new work') in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work; where does it come from; and what effect does it have on labor demand? To address these questions, we construct a novel database spanning eight decades of new job titles linked both to US Census microdata and to patent-based measures of occupations’ exposure to labor-augmenting and labor-automating innovations. We find, first, that the majority of current employment is in new job specialties introduced after 1940, but the locus of new work creation has shifted—from middle-paid production and clerical occupations over 1940–1980, to high-paid professional and, secondarily, low-paid services since 1980. Second, new work emerges in response to technological innovations that complement the outputs of occupations and demand shocks that raise occupational demand; conversely, innovations that automate tasks or reduce occupational demand slow new work emergence. Third, although flows of augmentation and automation innovations are positively correlated across occupations, the former boosts occupational labor demand while the latter depresses it. Harnessing shocks to the flow of augmentation and automation innovations spurred by breakthrough innovations two decades earlier, we establish that the effects of augmentation and automation innovations on new work emergence and occupational labor demand are causal. Finally, our results suggest that the demand-eroding effects of automation innovations have intensified in the last four decades while the demand-increasing effects of augmentation innovations have not.

We exploit historical natural experiments to test whether universities increase economic mobility and equality. We use "runner-up'" counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties. University establishment causes greater intergenerational income mobility but also increases cross-sectional income inequality. We highlight four findings to explain this seeming paradox: universities hollow out the local labor market and provide greater opportunities to achieve top incomes, both of which increase cross-sectional inequality, and increase educational attainment and connections to high-SES people, which prevent inequality from perpetuating into intergenerational immobility. Abstract We exploit historical natural experiments to test whether universities increase economic mobility and equality. We use runner-up counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties. University establishment causes greater intergenerational income mobility but also increases cross-sectional income inequality. We highlight four ndings to explain this seeming paradox: universities hollow out the local labor market and provide greater opportunities to achieve top incomes, both of which increase cross-sectional inequality, and increase educational attainment and connections to high-SES people, which prevent inequality from perpetuating into intergenerational immobility.

Almond (2006) argues that in utero exposure to the 1918 influenza pandemic reduced the 1919 birth cohort’s adult socioeconomic status (SES). We show that this cohort came from lower-SES families, which is incompatible with Almond’s cohort-comparison identification strategy. The adult SES deficit is reduced after background characteristics are controlled for; it is small and statistically insignificant in models that include household fixed effects. Replicating Almond’s state-level dose-response analysis, we find no evidence in census data that influenza exposure reduced adult SES. Evidence from a city-level dose-response analysis on educational attainment using WWII enlistees from 287 cities is mixed.

The economic analysis of racial discrimination in public accommodations is remarkably limited. To study this issue, we construct a national dataset of non discriminatory establishments from the Negro Motorist Green Books, a travel guide published from 1936 to 1966 to aid Black Americans in finding non-discriminatory retail and service establishments. We document patterns in the geographic spread and evolution of Green Book establishments, as well as the correlates of Green Book presence. We find economic and social measures, as well as state laws relating to racial discrimination and anti-discrimination, were correlated with the provision of non-discriminatory services. We then use the Green Book data to test whether market conditions and White consumer discrimination led businesses to bar Black customers prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We use plausibly exogenous variation from White WWII casualties and Black migration patterns to isolate the effect of a change in the racial composition of consumers on the growth of non-discriminatory businesses. We find that the share of non-discriminatory establishments grew faster in locations with larger increases in the share of the Black population, but the magnitudes were small. These results highlight the importance of federal legislation in ending racial discrimination in public accommodations.

We combine individual data from the 1940 full-count census with death records and other information available on the Family Tree at familysearch.org to create the largest individual dataset to date (17 million) to study the association between years of schooling and age at death. Conditional on surviving to age 35, one additional year of education is associated with roughly 0.4 more years of life for both men and women for cohorts born 1906-1915 and smaller for earlier cohorts. Focusing on the 1906-1915 cohort we find that this association is identical when we use sibling or twin fixed effects. This association varies substantially by place of birth. For men, the association is stronger in places with greater incomes, higher quality of school, and larger investments in public health. Women also exhibit great heterogeneity in the association, but our measures of the childhood environment do not explain it.

We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican-American school children in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attainment for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites in California. Our identification strategy relies on comparing individuals across California counties that vary in their likelihood of segregating and across birth cohorts that vary in their exposure to the Mendez court ruling based on school start age. Results point to a significant increase in educational attainment for Hispanics who were fully exposed to school desegregation

This paper examines the role of agricultural diversity in the process of development. Using data from US counties and exploiting climate-induced variation in agricultural production patterns, I show that mid-nineteenth-century agricultural diversity had positive l ong-run effects on population density and income per capita. During the Second Industrial Revolution, agricultural diversity fostered industrialization, diversification within manufacturing, patent activity, formation of new labor skills, and the expansion of knowledge- and skill-intensive industries. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that diversity spurs the acquisition of new ideas and new skills because of the presence of c ross-sector spillovers and complementarities

Research shows that refugees in the United States experience faster economic growth than other immigrants, in part because they have limited incentive to return home. However, this pattern has primarily been documented in the late 20th century, making it unclear whether faster economic assimilation is an inherent characteristic of refugee flows, or whether it is unique to recent decades. This paper uses data between 1850 and 2017 to compare the economic assimilation of refugee cohorts to economic cohorts. I find that after 1900, refugee cohorts start off at a lower average occupational prestige than both their economic immigrant and native-born counterparts upon arrival, but refugees economically assimilate at a faster rate and, in some periods, overtake the occupational prestige of economic immigrants after two decades. Older arrival periods display more complex patterns of assimilation where refugees do not always start off below natives or assimilate more quickly with more years of stay.

This paper documents the persistence of Southern slave owners in political power after the American Civil War. Using data from Texas, we show that former slave owners made up more than half of all state legislators until the late 1890s. Legislators with slave-owning backgrounds were more likely to be Democrats and voted more conservatively even conditional on party membership. A county’s propensity to elect former slave owners was positively correlated with cotton production, but negatively with Reconstruction-era progress of blacks. Counties that elected more slave owners also displayed worse educational outcomes for blacks in the early twentieth century.

We demonstrate an important complementarity between patriotism and public good provision. After 1933, the New Deal led to an unprecedented expansion of the US federal government's role. Those who benefited f rom s ocial s pending w ere m arkedly m ore patriotic during WW II: they bought more war bonds, volunteered more and, as soldiers, won more medals. This pattern was new-WW I volunteering did not show the same geography of patriotism. We match military service records with the 1940 census to show that this pattern holds at the individual level. Using geographical variation, we exploit two instruments to suggest that the effect is causal: droughts and congressional committee representation predict more New Deal agricultural support, as well as bond buying, volunteering, and medals.

Are heterogeneous labor market outcomes a product of markets efficiently allocating resources or the result of structural market failures which should be corrected through well-crafted policy? In order to address this fundamental question in modern economics, we must first understand the forces which shape individuals’ earnings, employment, and occupational choices. This collection of essays provides new evidence to support several novel channels which influence labor markets. First, I evaluate the connection between technological change and labor market outcomes by bringing new data and methods to study the mechanization of American agriculture in the early 20th century. Using an instrumental variables estimation strategy, I find that exogenous increases in exposure to technological change generated occupational displacement for incumbent laborers, increased income inequality, and had important impacts on intergenerational mobility for the children of affected workers. Additionally, I investigate the connection between low-opportunity neighborhoods and public housing residents’ labor market outcomes. Leveraging quasi-random variation in neighborhood quality due to a public housing demolition, I find that residents’ wages increased after moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods and that more intense supportive services improved post-move employment. Taken together, these essays provide new evidence that both large-scale factors like new technologies and local factors like neighborhood quality contribute to heterogeneity in labor market outcomes both historically and up to the present day.

This paper documents how a one-time income shock can alter the household wealth distribution through local housing market channels. In 1936, the United States government unexpectedly gave World War I veterans a large income transfer. This payment, equivalent to 1936 per capita income, greatly improved recipients’ 1940 home values and homeownership rates compared to those of their 1930 neighbors. These home value gaps widened as the spatial intensity of the shock increased but only for likely home purchasers. Loan-level data suggest this combination of direct benefits and negative neighborhood spillovers derived from veterans crowding out other potential borrowers.

This three-paper dissertation improves our understanding of how financial institutions and substance use impact local economies. It expands our understanding of economic resilience, with a focus on community banks, minority-owned banks, and opioid use. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of community-oriented financial institutions, community banks and minority-owned banks, in strengthening economic resilience. It also demonstrates how substance use, often viewed through the lenses of public health, can impact long-term economic development. Paper one estimates the impact of the community-bank market share on the timing and duration of the GFC in the US. This paper empirically demonstrates counties with higher community bank market shares are less likely to experience recession conditions. Paper two estimates the impact of the minority-owned bank market share on the severity of the Global Financial Crisis and the COVID Recession in the US. This paper empirically demonstrates counties with higher minority-owned bank market shares experience lower minority employment growth declines through the Global Financial Crisis, though not through the COVID Recession. Small business lending drives this effect; minority-owned banks continued lending through the Global Financial Crisis at higher rates relative to non-minority-owned banks. Paper three estimates the effect of region-level opioid use rates on net firm entry in the US. In this paper, I instrument for opioid use rates using pill mills, thus providing causal evidence that as core-based statistical area-level opioid use rates increase, net firm entry declines. Differential impacts are observed across firm sizes and industries; small firms and service-oriented firm are most impacted. Recent recessions in the US demonstrate the importance of economic resilience. Using a diverse set of econometric methods, this dissertation demonstrates the role of community-oriented financial institutions in strengthening economic resilience, as well as how public health conditions impact economic development.

Objectives: Retrospective measures of childhood socioeconomic status (SES) in cohort studies of aging that first observe people late in life-such as the Health and Retirement Study (HRS)-are widely used. However, their measurement validity and reliability are unknown. We assess the reliability and validity of the HRS's retrospective measures of parental education and childhood family finances. Methods: We use records for 6,343 HRS sample members who were children in 1940 that have been linked to records from the complete-count 1940 U.S. Census. We assess interrater reliability by comparing (a) retrospective reports of childhood SES collected from sample members in the 1992-2018 HRS to (b) prospective measures of parallel concepts collected from HRS sample members' parents in the 1940 Census. We assess predictive validity by comparing the results of analyses that model later-life outcomes as a function of childhood SES as measured both prospectively and retrospectively. Results: Interrater reliabilities of retrospective measures of parental education are high; however, the same is not true of the retrospective measure of childhood family finances. Both retrospective and prospective measures of childhood SES are predictive of later-life outcomes, and with similar strengths and directions of associations for most outcomes. Discussion: Researchers who rely on retrospective indicators of childhood SES from the HRS should be aware of their measurement properties. They are measured with error, and that error modestly attenuates estimates of their associations with later-life outcomes. However, prospective and retrospective measures of childhood SES have similar predictive validity. These findings should reassure researchers who rely on retrospective measures of childhood SES in the HRS and similarly designed surveys.

This article describes the linkage methods that will be used in the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage project (DCDL), which is completing the final four decades of a longitudinal census infrastructure covering the past 170 years of United States history. DCDL is digitizing and creating linkages between nearly a billion records across the 1960 through 1990 U.S. censuses, as well as to already-linked records from the censuses of 1940, 2000, 2010, and 2020. Our main goals in this article are to (1) describe the development of the DCDL and the protocol we will follow to build the linkages between the census files, (2) outline the techniques we will use to evaluate the quality of the links, and (3) show how the assignment and evaluation of these linkages leverages the joint use of routinely collected administrative data and non-routine survey data.