This paper explores the role of migrant networks on the occupa-tional earnings of Swedish male immigrants in the United Statesfrom 1900 to 1920. Using data from full-count U.S. censuses, weconstruct various measurements of migrant networks based on theshare of Swedish, other Scandinavian, and other foreign-born indi-viduals at both the county and neighborhood levels. To define theneighborhood levels, we exploit the fact that the historical U.Scensuses typically enumerated next-door neighbors followingeach other in census forms. The findings reveal a nuanced relation-ship between migrant networks and economic outcomes.Specifically, residing in counties with a high concentration ofSwedish or other Scandinavian immigrants is linked to lower occu-pational earnings, consistent with prior research. In contrast, livingin neighborhoods with a substantial presence of Swedish or otherScandinavian-born individuals is associated with higher occupa-tional earnings. Importantly, these effects are entirely driven byurban areas, where migrant networks appear to facilitate bettereconomic opportunities. In rural areas, no significant networkeffects are observed. These findings highlight the importance ofconsidering spatial dimensions and varying levels of social proxi-mity when studying migrant networks. By broadening the defini-tion of these networks, this paper offers a deeper understanding oftheir role in shaping the economic assimilation of immigrants.

The idea that labor scarcity can induce economic development has been long hypothesized (Hicks, 1932; Habakkuk, 1962), but the evidence is scarce, especially on non-agricultural development. In this paper, I assess the role of the Second Great Migration (1940-1970) on the subsequent structural change in the American South between 1970 and 2010. Empirical results using shift-share instruments show that out-migration incentivized physical capital investment and capital-augmenting technical change, increasing capital and output per worker in both agriculture and manufacturing at least until 2010. Labor reallocated from agriculture to nonagriculture. I then develop and calibrate a dynamic spatial equilibrium model that allows substitution between factors of production, factor-biased technical change, and Heckscher–Ohlin forces in trade. The quantitative results indicate that the adjustments to the Second Great Migration could have contributed to 7% of the total decrease in agricultural employment between 1940 and 2010 in the South. The contribution analyses suggest that labor-capital substitution played a leading role in economic adjustment to the migration, with capital-biased technical change and the quasi-Rybczynski effect playing important supplementary roles.

We study the impact of Federal alcohol Prohibition in 1919 on workers in the alcohol industry and their families using newly linked census records that allow us to follow spouses, sons and daughters. Immediately after Prohibition, men previously working in alcohol-related industries were less likely to be in the labor force, and when working, employed in lower skilled occupations. By 1940, 21 years after Prohibition, workers were still more likely to be in unskilled occupations, but they were more likely to be employed, consistent with delayed retirement. In the short run, sons are largely unaffected but in the long run, they complete slightly more schooling and earn more. Interestingly, daughters were more likely to remain at home, delay marriage and be employed, even 20 years later. These effects are driven by daughters living at home in 1920.

Asian immigration to the United States motivated the first instance of federal immigration legislation with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, but little is known about Asian immigration during the period despite a robust literature on their European counterparts. I use linked cohorts drawn from complete-count census data to find that Asian immigrants displayed the "u-shaped" pattern of occupational assimilation characterizing contemporaneous European immigrants. I also find that they displayed a "catch-up" assimilation phenomenon: successive Asian cohorts steadily reduced their outcome gaps with the native population, and despite starting at a lower occupational tier than European immigrants, they assimilated more than European immigrants in all cohorts but the post-Exclusion cohort of 1880-1900. These findings provide insight into the assimilation process of an understudied immigrant community, furthering the understanding of assimilation in the United States.

Appendix for Reconstruction-Era Education and Long-Run Black-White Inequality

I study whether the imposition of anti-immigration policy affects the subsequent passage of anti-trade legislation, using the protectionist Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 as a setting. I show that the immigration quotas resulted in a higher likelihood of voting in favour of Smoot–Hawley and raising tariffs; this effect is driven primarily by increased Republican representation. Districts who voted in an anti-immigration manner in 1924 were subsequently more likely to vote in support of Smoot–Hawley in 1930 if affected by the immigration quotas. In contrast, districts who voted against immigration restrictions were then more likely to oppose Smoot–Hawley if they became heavily affected by immigration quotas. My results therefore suggest that the immigration quotas from the 1921 and 1924 anti-immigration legislation may have increased polarization in congressional voting within the House of Representatives.

This StoryMap shows how racially segregated neighborhoods were created in San Bernardino from the 1920s through the 1960s, and how these patterns of segregation shaped schools, city planning and Black-white wealth disparities. It documents the ways restrictive covenants, white vigilante violence, real estate steering, and white flight shaped the color line in San Bernardino as the Black population increased from 1940 through 1970. The StoryMap uses census data newly compiled by a People's History of the I.E. Census Project from IPUMS Ancestry Full Count Data and from IPUMS USA data to visualize the changing patterns of racial segregation from 1940-1970. The StoryMap also draws heavily on the stories of Black elders from the Bridges That Carried Us Over Project: Documenting Black History in the Inland Empire, and on the People's History Map of the Archives which has created a geospatial database that enables us to trace the geography of real estate ads, white vigilante actions, and Black pioneers who crossed the color line.

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the United States have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets that include information linking parents to their adult children. This problem has been especially acute for women, who are more difficult to link because their surnames often change between childhood and adulthood. In this paper, we use a new dataset, the Census Tree, that overcomes these issues by building on information from an online genealogy platform. Users of the platform have private information that allows them to create links among the 1850 to 1940 decennial censuses; the Census Tree combines these links with others obtained using machine learning and traditional linking methods to produce a dataset with hundreds of millions of census-to-census links, nearly half of which are for women. With these data, we produce estimates of the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status from fathers to their sons and daughters. We find that for married men and women, the patterns of mobility over this period are remarkably similar. Single women, however, are less mobile than their male counterparts. We also present new estimates that show that assortative mating was much stronger than previously estimated for the US.

In the early twentieth century, the mining industry was characterized by isolation, dangerous working conditions, employer power, and declining employment. However, miners also enjoyed high earnings, flexible schedules, and company housing. In this article, I explore intergenerational economic mobility for miners’ sons. Using linked full-count US Census data to explore outcomes for miners’ sons compared to other sons, I find that miners’ sons usually do worse than manufacturing workers’ sons but better than farmers’ sons. Successful sons of miners grew up in urban neighborhoods that were mining-dependent, had access to education, and moved from their childhood counties. Sons of miners in the coal industry, which was shrinking, also did worse than sons of miners in the oil industry, which was expanding. This article sheds light on the effect that industry growth and geographic isolation has on intergenerational outcomes.

We use linked historical US censuses to study the empirical relationship between inequality and intergenerational mobility. We first confirm that the "Great Gatsby Curve" already existed in the early 20th century. We then study a "dynamic" version of the curve that relates changes in equality to changes in intergenerational mobility. Surprisingly, we find that this relationship is unstable over horizons of two decades for income, but not for education. Finally, we propose novel unitless measures of intergenerational mobility and inequality to show that the "Great Gatsby Curve" result re-emerges over the long run, for the period 1920 to 2011.

This dissertation explores the role federal policy can play in rectifying gender inequities in labor market outcomes. The first chapter shows that federal anti-discrimination policy helped to increase women’s representation in medical education, contributing to a stark decline in occupational segregation in the second half of the 20th century. The second chapter shows that equal pay policy in the 1960s led to marked increases in women’s earnings, staving off an increase in the gender pay gap, especially for lower-earning women. The third chapter makes a theoretical contribution to our understanding of why firms offer parental leave, an amenity at the heart of discussions surrounding the differential labor market impact of childbirth on women and men. In Chapter 1, I consider the role of federal policy in increasing women’s access to medical education. In the 1960s, women comprised under 10% of all medical students, resulting in a lopsided gender imbalance in the medical profession. I find that a host of federal anti-discrimination policies, implemented in the late 1960s and early 1970s, increased women’s enrollment by successfully applying pressure to curb sex discrimination in admissions though the threat of revoking federal funding. In addition, this policy amplified the impact of a massive expansion in enrollment through Health Manpower policy on women by allowing them to capture a higher fraction of newly created seats. In Chapter 2, Martha J. Bailey, Bryan A. Stuart and I consider the success of two landmark statutes—the Equal Pay and Civil Rights Acts—in targeting the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. At the beginning of the 1960s, the gender earnings ratio at the median had dipped below 60%, and the stability of this statistic over the next decade suggested that policy had not done much to alleviate this gap. We revisit this conclusion using two separate causal designs. In our first design, we find that women’s wages grew more quickly after 1964 in states that did not have pre-existing equal pay laws, where we would expect the effects of federal policy to be the strongest. Then, in our second design, we find larger wage growth for women working in jobs with a higher wage gap, where pay discrimination is more likely to be present. In Chapter 3, I consider the question of why firms voluntarily offer parental leave as a benefit to employees. The federal government requires covered employers to provide only 12 weeks of job protected unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act, but many employers provide additional wage replacement and leave time beyond this statutory requirement. I consider a setting where workers and firms search over a collection of submarkets characterized by the posted wage and likelihood of finding an employment match. Firms are homogenous but are able to choose whether or not they offer a job with parental leave. Workers differ from one another in the amount of time they would spend out of the labor market on leave after childbirth. I find that firms will only offer leave when the duration of expected leave is below a particular threshold. This threshold is given at the point where the benefit of leave, given by hiring savings, is higher than the cost of retaining a worker on leave net of pass through to the employee.

“Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the lifeblood of real civilization. [. . . ] There is nothing that more divides civilized from semi-savage man than to be conscious of our forefathers as they really were, and bit by bit to reconstruct the mosaic of the longforgotten past. To weigh the stars, or to make ships sail in the air or below the sea, is not a more astonishing and ennobling performance on the part of the human race in these latter days, than to know the course of events that had long been forgotten, and the true nature of men and women who were here before us.” Trevelyan (1942)

Researchers generally recognize that ethnoracial identification may shift over the life course. However, the prevalence of these shifts across cohorts and among older adults remains open questions. Using administrative data from Social Security applications from 1984 to 2007, we quantify the magnitude and direction of later-life shifts in ethnoracial self-identification between Black, White, Asian, American Indian, and Hispanic categories for the “Greatest Generation,” those born between 1901 and 1927. Overall, 2.3% of persons in these data changed their ethnoracial identification after the age of 57, with distinct patterns of change for ethnoracial subgroups. By linking to the 1940 Census, we find a positive and significant association between socioeconomic status in early life and a shift from non-White to non-Hispanic White identification in later life. We conclude that ethnoracial self-identification fluidity continues even among older adults, varying in response to social position, ethnoracial climate, and events in greater society.

Over the past two decades IPUMS has engaged in collaborations with three genealogical organizations to produce large census microdata collections of the United States spanning the period from 1850 to 1940. This paper briefly describes how each of these collaborations began and what they entailed.

The interwar isolationist movement constrained US governments from intervening to deter Fascist aggression. But what motivated this movement? We digitize archival records relating to 24,000 donors to the America First Committee, the largest isolationist group, which we merge into the 1940 US Census. German immigrants, especially those with stronger German identities as measured by naming and intermarriage, made up the rank and file of America First. We find little evidence that sectoral economic interests drove isolationism. These results indicate the importance of immigrant diasporas for foreign policy. Underscoring the link between German identity and isolationism, we find that German immigrants resident in counties with higher First World War casualties, which stimulated anti-German discrimination, had weaker German identities by 1940 and were less likely to donate. Isolationism was not born of isolation.

We examine the degree to which parental gender preferences in the USA have changed over time. To quantify levels of parental sex preference, we compare the likelihood that mothers have a third child given the gender makeup of their first two children. We construct a novel dataset of women’s fertility histories using full-count censuses from 1850–1880 and 1900–1940 and extend the sample to 2019 using more recent datasets. We find a preference for having a mix of genders with only a small preference for sons. We find that a woman is about 2 percentage points more likely to have a third child if the sex of her first two children is the same, and this effect was very stable from 1850 to 1940. In contrast, we find that this effect gets mu ch larger after 1940, reaching a high point in 1990–2000 of about 6–7 percentage points.

A remarkable and repeatedly replicated rural school attendance and enrollment advantage in the pre-Great Depression period confounds both critical historians and functionalist social scientists, who argue that the processes of urbanization and industrialization was central to the U.S.’s rapid postbellum school system expansion. This expansion, and the rural attendance advantage has typically been attributed to the rise of the high school movement, a decentralized campaign to expand secondary school education that started in New England and rapidly spread to the Midwest. How robust was the rural school participation advantage? Did this advantage translate to into an advantage in conventionally measured educational attainment? I investigate these questions using the 1870 – 1930 full count Census records of children aged 5 to 19, which I link to the full count 1940 Decennial Census, the first to record educational attainment. I document the following four facts. First, at the individual, county-, and state-levels, urbanization and the fraction of the population engaged in manufacturing were associated with higher levels of school attendance at younger ages; the reverse was true at high school ages both before and after 1900. Second, urbanization and industrialization were associated with reduced school attendance among all students aged 5 to 19. Third, I replicate earlier findings that school attendance propensity was decreasing in local population size all else equal for older youth, but, again, the reverse was true at younger ages. Fourth, I compare the reported 1940 educational attainment of rural youth aged 5 to 19 appearing in the 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920 with urban youth appearing in the same cross-section. Relative to large cities, the age-specific rural attendance advantages I document did not usually translate into elevated educational attainment in the Census cross- sections analyzed. The rapid spread of the high school movement in rural areas and elevated age- specific attendance rates that ensued did not overcome the structural disadvantages associated with growing up in a rural area. In the pre-Great Depression U.S., elevated measures on the age- specific attendance and enrollment statistics used in prior studies of school system expansion may not always have signaled increased educational opportunity.

In this paper, we propose a method for constructing an occupation-based socioeconomic index that can easily incorporate changes in occupational structure. The resulting index is the occupational percentile rank for a given cohort, based on contemporaneous information pertaining to educational composition and the number of workers at the occupation level. An occupation may experience an increase or decrease in its occupational rank due to changes in relative sizes and educational compositions across occupations. The method is flexible in dealing with changes in occupational and educational measurements over time. Applying the method to U.S. history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, we derive the index using IPUMS U.S. Census microdata from 1850 to 2000 and the American Community Surveys (ACSs) from 2001 to 2018. Compared to previous occupational measures, this new measure takes into account occupational status evolvement caused by long-term secular changes in occupational size and educational composition. The resulting percentile rank measure can be easily merged with social surveys and administrative data that include occupational measures based on the U.S. Census occupation codes and crosswalks.

This paper estimates the returns to human capital accumulation during the first era of mega-firms in the United States by linking employees at General Electric-a canonical enterprise associated with the "visible hand" of managerial hierarchies-to the 1940 census. I find large returns to higher education through seniority in the hierarchy, span of control, earnings, and selection into management training, using the proximity of land-grant colleges and historical universities to birth states for identification. The findings highlight the human capital determinants of the managerial revolution at a prominent firm, driven by earlier public investments in the US education system.

This study examines the substitutability between prime-age (ages 25-54) and marginal-retirement-age (ages 55-64) workers by investigating the impact of internal migration of prime-age workers across 320 U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Areas from 2002 to 2019. A 1% increase in prime-age worker inflows boosts the relative employment of prime-to marginal-retirement-age workers by 1.39%. The inflow shock reduces relative earnings by 0.18%, indicating a substitution elasticity of 7.7. Interpreted via an overlapping generations model, the inflow of prime-age workers, coupled with low substitutability, enhances the welfare of workers nearing retirement. Therefore, I emphasize that policymakers should consider not just relocating people to high-inflow areas but also reducing worker substitutability to improve the welfare of the marginal-retirement-age population.