During the nineteenth century manufacturing increased its share of the labor force in the United States, and manufacturing became more urban, as did the population. Our survey of the literature and analyses of census data suggests that a key reason was the development of a nationwide transportation system, especially the railroad. Coupled with changes in manufacturing technology and organizational form, the “transportation revolution” increased demand for manufacturing labor in urban locations. Labor supply responded and because of agglomeration economies, population density and the size and number of urban places increased. Although our focus is on the US experience, a causal role for transportation is likely for other economies that experienced historical industrialization and urbanization.

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South to the North. Many counties that had the strongest positive impacts on children during the 1940s offer relatively poor opportunities for Black youth today. Opportunities for Black children were greater in places with more schooling investment, stronger labor market opportunities for Black adults, more social capital, and less crime.

Objective: This study seeks to investigate how social, political, and economic factors shaped demand for membership in three major federated fraternal orders in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries: the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, the Knights of Pythias, and the Improved Order of Red Men. Methods: Error-correction, time-series-cross-sectional models are estimated using state-level data, with the first differences in total membership, new initiations, and suspensions serving as dependent variables. Results: We find evidence that railroads, urbanization, immigration , bank panics, and presidential election years all had significant effects on membership; those effects, however, varied by fraternal order. Conclusion: The demand for American fraternalism was affected by civil society, politics, and the economy in ways that scholars have not previously studied.

This paper uses newly digitized border crossing records from the early 20th century to study the destination choice of female and male French Canadian migrants to the United States. Immigrant sorting across destinations was strikingly different between women and men. Absolute returns to skill dominate in explaining sorting among men, while job search costs and access to ethnic networks were more important for single women. Married women were typically tied to a spouse whose labour market opportunities determined the joint destination, and were much less responsive to destination characteristics as a result.

The papers in this dissertation empirically estimate the causal effect of our social environment on our beliefs, preferences, and well-being. I present clear evidence that our decisions are not made in isolation. Rather, our very beliefs and preferences are shaped by our neighbors. Even our happiness may depend on the circumstances of those around us. The first paper reports evidence that neighbors with strong preferences or beliefs around politics, religion, or race are likely to shape our beliefs and preferences. In fact, the migration of individuals with strong preferences appears to be a key determinant of geographic patterns in political outcomes in contemporary America. The second paper shows how social context shapes reports of psychological well-being commonly used in important longitudinal surveys. Individuals understate the symptoms of depression and overstate their happiness when reporting directly to another individual. The final papers tests the relative income hypothesis showing that we are less happy when our neighbors become relatively richer. However, we find no evidence that individuals are averse to increases in income inequality.

Social demographers and historians have devoted extensive research to patterns of racial segregation that emerged under Jim Crow and during the post-Civil Rights era but have paid less attention to the role of slavery in shaping the residential distribution of Black populations in the United States. One guiding assumption has been that slavery rendered racial segregation to be both unnecessary and impractical. In this study, I argue that apart from the master–slave relationship, slavery relentlessly produced racial segregation during the antebellum period through the residential isolation of slaves and free people of color. To explain this pattern, I draw on racial threat theory to test hypotheses regarding interracial economic competition and fear of slave mobilization using data from the 1850 Census, as well as an architectural survey of antebellum sites. Findings suggest that the residential segregation of free people of color increased with their local prevalence, whereas the segregation of slaves increased with the prevalence of the slave population. These patterns continue to hold after controlling for interracial competition over land or jobs and past slave rebellions or conspiracies.

We estimate the long-run effects of the 1930s Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining maps by linking children in the full count 1940 Census to 1) the universe of IRS tax data in 1974 and 1979 and 2) the long form 2000 Census. We use two identification strategies to estimate the potential long-run effects of differential access to credit along HOLC boundaries. The first strategy compares cross-boundary differences along HOLC boundaries to a comparison group of boundaries that had statistically similar pre-existing differences as the actual boundaries. A second approach only uses boundaries that were least likely to have been chosen by the HOLC based on our statistical model. We find that children living on the lower-graded side of HOLC boundaries had significantly lower levels of educational attainment, reduced income in adulthood, and lived in neighborhoods during adulthood characterized by lower educational attainment, higher poverty rates, and higher rates of single-headed households.

Background: While much progress has been made in understanding the demographic determinants of mortality in the United States using individual survey data and aggregate tabulations, the lack of population-level register data is a barrier to further advances in mortality research. With the release of Social Security application (SS-5), claim, and death records, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has created a new administrative data resource for researchers studying mortality. We introduce the Berkeley Unified Numident Mortality Database (BUNMD), a cleaned and harmonized version of these records. This publicly available dataset provides researchers access to over 49 million individual-level mortality records with demographic covariates and fine geographic detail, allowing for high-resolution mortality research. Objective: The purpose of this paper is to describe the BUNMD, discuss statistical methods for estimating mortality differentials based on this deaths-only dataset, and provide case studies illustrating the high-resolution mortality research possible with the BUNMD. Methods: We provide detailed information on our procedure for constructing the BUNMD dataset from the most informative parts of the publicly available Social Security Numident application, claim, and death records. Contribution: The BUNMD is now publicly available, and we anticipate these data will facilitate new avenues of research into the determinants of mortality disparities in the United States.

The economic characteristics of one’s childhood neighborhood have been found to deter mine long-term well-being. Policies enacted dur ing child hood may change neighborhood trajectories and thus impact long-term outcomes for children. We use individual-level data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the enduring consequences of childhood exposure to local-area New Deal emergency employment work-relief activ ity. Our out comes include ado les cent cog ni tion, edu ca tional attain­ment, mid­life income, health behav­iors, late-life cog­ni­tion, and mor­tal­ity. We find that children (ages 0–3) living in neighborhoods with moderate work-relief activity in 1940 had higher adolescent IQ scores, had higher class rank, and were more likely to obtain at least a bach­e­lor’s degree. We find endur­ing ben­e­fits for mid­life income and late-life cognition for males who grew up in areas with a moderate amount of work relief. We find mixed results for males who grew up in the most dis­ad­van­taged areas with the highest levels of work-relief activity. These children had similar educational outcomes as those in the most advantaged districts with the lowest work-relief activity but had higher adult smok­ing rates. Our find­ings pro­vide some of the first evi­dence of the long-term consequences of New Deal policies on children’s long-term life course outcomes.