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Title: Black Networks After Emancipation: Evidence from Reconstruction and the Great Migration

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2015

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Abstract: This study provides quantitative evidence that southern blacks were able to form networks soon after Emancipation – during Reconstruction and the Great Migration – but only in places where specific conditions prevailed. Our theory indicates that networks will only form when social connectedness in the population from which they are drawn is sufficiently large. This implies that there exists a threshold below which there is no relation between social connected- ness and network-based outcomes - political participation, church membership, migration - and above which there is a positive association. Using county cropping patterns to measure social connectedness in the black farm population, we document the existence of thresholds at which the specific “slope change” predicted by our theory holds. This finding is robust to rigorous testing, and these tests do not detect the nonlinearity implied by our theory for blacks at other points in time; for whites; or for variables not associated with networks. Our results imply that black migration from southern counties above the connectedness threshold would have been significantly smaller in the absence of network externalities. Consistent with the presence of ex- ternalities, migrants from those counties were much more likely to move to the same destination cities than migrants from elsewhere.

Url: https://www.histecon.magd.cam.ac.uk/km/Chay_Munshi_December2015.pdf

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Authors: Chay, Kenneth; Munshi, Kaivan

Publisher: Brown University and NBER

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

Countries: United States