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Title: Marriage, migration and work: three essays on mobility in the United States, 1850-1930

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: This dissertation studies three forms of mobility in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first chapter uses newly collected data from Union Army widows pension files to isolate the causal effect of womens income on their decisions about marriage. Making use of exogenous variation in the processing time of pension applications, I show that receiving a pension caused widows to remarry at a significantly slower rate. This suggests that womens income directly influenced marital outcomes, largely by making women more selective in the marriage market. The second chapter explores the extent to which nineteenth century internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading should have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. . . .

Url: https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/15250

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Authors: Salisbury, Laura

Institution: Boston University

Department: Economics

Advisor: Robert A. Margo

Degree: PhD

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration

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