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Title: Migration, Trade, and Long-Run Adjustments to Economic Change: Evidence From the 20th-Century U.S.
Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis
Publication Year: 2025
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Abstract: Economic adjustments can affect long-term aggregate and regional development through labor reallocation, capital investment, and structural change. This dissertation explores the role of such economic forces in shaping history by studying large-scale internal migration, environmental shock, and government investment in the 20th-century United States by combining empirical analysis with quantitative modeling. First, I study how the Second Great Migration (1940–1970) reshaped the American South between 1970 and 2010. The empirical analysis using shift-share instruments shows that out-migration induced capital investment and capital-augmenting technical change in the South. Labor was reallocated from agriculture to manufacturing and local services. To interpret these findings, I develop a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model that incorporates factor substitution, factor-biased technical change, and trade. The counterfactual analysis reveals labor-capital substitution as a key mechanism for adjusting to the out-migration.
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Authors: Yang, Dongkyu
Institution: University of Colorado
Department: Economics
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Pages: 1-228
Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS USA - Ancestry Full Count Data
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare
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