This dissertation consists of two chapters: “Intergenerational Mobility in the 1920-1940 United States” and “Segregation, the Great Migration, and African American Outcomes: 1920-1990.” Both papers consider the relationship between where people live and grow up and their economic outcomes such as income and educational attainment. Both papers rely heavily on 1920-1940 100 percent U.S. census samples, especially a panel data set linking boys across the three census waves. “Intergenerational Mobility in the 1920-1940 United States” begins by generating predicted adult income percentiles by across places in 1940 for children born to parents in the 25th and 75th percentiles of the national income distribution. It then compares those place predictions to the predictions in the modern United States and documents some of the differences and similarities between these place predictions in the historical and modern data. Finally, the paper estimates the effect of greater exposure time to better places on children’s long-term incomes using an identification strategy based on children who moved from one place to another between 1920 and 1930. It finds no evidence that exposure time to places mattered in the 1920s. “Segregation, the Great Migration, and African American Outcomes: 1920-1990” begins by illustrating that the OLS relationship between segregation and income and education for African Americans is negative in data from 1990, but positive in data from 1940. This paper seeks, therefore, to determine what made the 1940 relationship between segregation and black outcomes look so much better than the modern relationship. It shows that omitted industrial and place-level characteristics explain a lot of the positive 1940 relationship, but that the relationship is still positive and statistically significant, even controlling for many place level characteristics. The paper then uses panel data to show that selective migration patterns between 1920 and 1940 reduced the black human capital stock in segregated cities, actually biasing down the 1940 relationship between segregation and black outcomes.
Bernard, James Malcolm,
"The Effect of Places on Income and Educational Attainment: 1920-1940"
(2018).
Economics Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/s0m9-e272
