Europe's Tired, Poor, Huddled Masses: Self-Selection and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration

The Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913) was among the largest migration episodes in history. Unlike today, the United States maintained an open border in this era. We compile a novel dataset of Norway-to-US migrants and estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection. Our first method compares migrants to their brothers who remained in Norway; our second exploits the fact that, under primogeniture, older sons in land-owning families were less likely to migrate. We find that these migrants, unhindered by entry restrictions, were negatively selected from the sending population, and that the return to migration was relatively low.Mirgation, Selection

Automated linking of historical data

The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage, performing a series of comparisons across methods and against hand linking. We have three main findings that lead us to conclude that automated methods perform well. First, a number of automated methods generate very low (less than 5%) false positive rates. The automated methods trace out a frontier illustrating the tradeoff between the false positive rate and the (true) match rate. Relative to more conservative automated algorithms, humans tend to link more observations but at a cost of higher rates of false positives. Second, when human linkers and algorithms use the same linking variables, there is relatively little disagreement between them. Third, across a number of plausible analyses, coefficient estimates and parameters of interest are very similar when using linked samples based on each of the different automated methods. We provide code and Stata commands to implement the various automated methods.Accepted manuscriptFirst author draf

Apocalyptic Literature and the Study of Early Jewish Mysticism

This chapter examines apocalyptic literature within the framework of “early Jewish mysticism” and compares early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings with rabbinic and Hekhalot materials. It begins by focusing on apocalyptic literature and the discourse of “mysticism” in religious studies before turning to continuity and rupture in the Jewish discourse of heavenly ascent. It then considers textuality and textual practice in the study of early Jewish mysticism as well as the patterns of similarity and difference between early Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature and Jewish ascent texts from late antiquity, including Hekhalot literature. It concludes by highlighting the persistent gap between the literary artifacts that make up apocalyptic and Hekhalot literatures as well as differences in rituals and religious experience

The Effect of Internal Migration on Local Labor Markets: American Cities During the Great Depression

During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a destination with extreme weather events and variation in New Deal programs in typical sending areas. Migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work and/or access to relief jobs. Given the period's high unemployment, these lost work opportunities were costly to existing residents.

Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migration and Racial Wage Convergence in the North, 1940-1970

Four million blacks left the South from 1940 to 1970, doubling the northern black workforce. I exploit variation in migrant flows within skill groups over time to estimate the elasticity of substitution by race. I then use this estimate to calculate counterfactual rates of wage growth. I find that black wages in the North would have been around 7 percent higher in 1970 if not for the migrant influx, while white wages would have remained unchanged. On net, migration was an avenue for black economic advancement, but the migration created both winners and losers.

School Desegregation and Urban Change: Evidence from City Boundaries

I examine changes in the city-suburban housing price gap in metropolitan areas with and without court-ordered desegregation plans over the 1970s, narrowing my comparison to housing units on opposite sides of district boundaries. The desegregation of public schools in central cities reduced the demand for urban residence, leading urban housing prices and rents to decline by six percent relative to neighboring suburbs. The aversion to integration was due both to changes in peer composition and to student reassignment to non-neighborhood schools. The associated reduction in the urban tax base imposed a fiscal externality on remaining urban residents.

White Suburbanization and African-American Home Ownership, 1940-1980

Between 1940 and 1980, the homeownership rate among metropolitan African-American households increased by 27 percentage points. Nearly three-quarters of this increase occurred in central cities. We show that rising black homeownership in central cities was facilitated by the movement of white households to the suburban ring, which reduced the price of urban housing units conducive to owner-occupancy. Our OLS and IV estimates imply that 26 percent of the national increase in black homeownership over the period is explained by white suburbanization.

Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migration and Northern Labor Markets, 1940-1970

Abstract: Black migration from the South represented a large increase in labor supply above the MasonDixon line during and after World War II. The skill profile of new arrivals overlapped with that of the existing black workforce. Following Borjas (2003), I use variation in migrant supply shocks across skill groups -defined by educational attainment and work experience -over time to identify the impact of southern migration on northern black and white workers. A five percent increase in the labor force due to southern black migration (the mean across skill groups) would have reduced the earnings of black workers relative to whites by 3-5 percent. The differential effect by race is consistent with patterns of racial segregation by occupation and seniority level. If not for the southern influx, the North would have likely experienced faster convergence in black-white earnings