Full Citation
Title: The Economic Impact of the First Great Migration
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2019
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Abstract: This dissertation studies the first Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to Urban areas in the northern United States. While most existing research has focused on the experiences of the migrants themselves, I am focused on how this influx of rural black migrants impacted outcomes for African Americans who were already living in the north and had already attained a modicum of economic success. Common themes throughout this dissertation involve the use of the complete-count U.S. population census to link records across years. In the first chapter, I linked northern-born blacks from 1910 to 1930 to study how the arrival of new black residents affected the employment outcomes of existing northernborn black residents. I find that southern black migrants served as both competitors and consumers to northern-born blacks in the labor market. In the second chapter, my co-authors and I study the role of segregated housing markets in eroding black wealth during the Great Migration. Building a new sample of matched census addresses from 1930 to 1940, we find that racial transition on a block was associated with both soaring rental prices and declines in the sales value of homes. In other words, black families paid more to rent housing and faced falling values of homes they were able to purchase. Finally, the third chapter compares the rates of intergenerational occupational mobility by both race and region. I find that racial mobility difference in the North was more substantial than it was in the South. However, regional mobility difference for blacks is greater than any gap in intergenerational mobility by race in prewar American. Therefore, the first Great Migration helped blacks successfully translate their geographic mobility into economic mobility
Url: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/37312/7/Li_Dissertation_ETD_Final.pdf
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Authors: Li, Sijie
Institution: University of Pittsburgh
Department: Economics
Advisor: Allison Shertzer
Degree: Ph.D.
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Pages: 1-139
Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity
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