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Title: Death in the Promised Land: the Great Migration and Black Infant Mortality
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2016
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Abstract: The Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North entailed a significant change in the health environment, particularly for infants, during a time when access to medical care and public health infrastructure became increasingly important. We create a new dataset that links individual infant death certificates to parental characteristics to assess the impact of parents migration to Northern cities on infant mortality. The new dataset allows a number of key innovations. First, we construct infant mortality rates specific to migrants and also for a period (1915-1920) prior to the registration of births in many of the states. Second, the microdata allow us to control for the selection into migration and assess a number of potential mechanisms for the migrant health effect. Conditional on parents pre-migration observable characteristics and county-of-origin fixed effects, we find that black infants were more likely to die in the North relative to their southern-born counterparts in 1920, but that gap disappeared by 1940. We do not find any evidence of migrant selection. The initial migrants faced higher mortality rates than northern-born blacks, but this gap eventually vanished by 1930. Our results are consistent with differentials in mortality being driven by differences between cities and rural areas. Given that infant health has a long-lasting impact on adult outcomes, the results shed light on whether and how the Great Migration contributed to African Americans secular gains in health and income during the 20th century.
Url: http://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/eriksson_niemesh_gm_dec2016.pdf
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Authors: Eriksson, Katherine; Niemesh, Gregory T
Publisher: University of California - Davis
Data Collections: IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Fertility and Mortality, Migration and Immigration, Race and Ethnicity
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