Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Collins, William J.; Wanamaker, Marianne H.
• 署名单位: Vanderbilt University; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Tennessee System; University of Tennessee Knoxville
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-APPLIED ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7782
• DOI: 10.1257/app.6.1.220
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 220-252
• 关键词: civil-rights policy; self-selection; UNITED-STATES; occupational-mobility; Income differences; wage convergence; labor-markets; black; opportunity; compression

摘要

The onset of World War I spurred the Great Migration of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migration? How large were the migrants' gains? Did migration narrow the racial gap in economic status? We find evidence of positive selection, but the migrants' gains were large. A substantial amount of black-white convergence in this period is attributable to migration.