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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | THE MODERN AND HISTORICAL ROOTS OF INEQUALITY
LUKAS ALTHOFF
A DISSERTATION
PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY
OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE
OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY
THE DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
ADVISERS: LEAH BOUSTAN, ELLORA DERENONCOURT, STEPHEN REDDING
MAY 2023
© Copyright by Lukas Althoff, 2023.
All Rights Reserved
# Abstract
This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black-white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks.
<page_number>iii</page_number>
# Acknowledgements
I am profoundly indebted to my advisers, Leah Boustan, Ellora Derenoncourt, and Stephen Redding, whose guidance, mentorship, and support have been essential to the successful completion of this dissertation. I am grateful for my co-authors, Hugo Reichardt and Harriet Brookes Gray, whose collaboration has been a highlight of my academic journey.
I thank Davide Cantoni, David Card, Raj Chetty, Jeremiah Dittmar, Jonathon Hazell, Allan Hsiao, Richard Hornbeck, Ethan Ilzetzki, Ilyana Kuziemko, Camille Landais, David Lee, Trevon Logan, Ben Moll, Suresh Naidu, Ricardo Reis, Maarten de Ridder, Bryan Stuart, Chris Walters, Tianyi Wang, Zach Ward, Gavin Wright, and all seminar and conference participants who have generously provided me with their valuable feedback and suggestions. I thank Tre’ McMillan, Cynthia Nwankwo, and Bracklinn Williams for their exceptional research assistance. Their dedication, hard work, and attention to detail have made a significant contribution to this dissertation.
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Their dedication, hard work, and attention to detail have made a significant contribution to this dissertation.
Finally, I am thankful for the support and resources provided by the Program for Research on Inequality, the Industrial Relations Section, and the Prize Fellowship in the Social Sciences that have allowed me to focus on my research and achieve my academic goals.
The research contained in this dissertation has been presented at the following departmental seminars: Applied Young Economist Webinar, Berkeley, City University of New York, Florida State, Harvard, Institute for the World Economy, LSE, Princeton, Princeton History, Stanford, Stanford GSB, Stellenbosch, Tilburg, UChicago Booth, UChicago Harris, University of Munich, Yale SOM, and YSI-EHES Economic History Graduate Webinar; as well as the following conferences: NBER Economics of Mobility Meeting, NBER Summer Institute, CESifo Venice Summer Institute, Conference on Urban and Regional Economics (Philadelphia Fed), European & North American Meetings of the Urban Economics Association, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, Economic History Association Annual Meeting, Inequality Conference (University of Konstanz), Rising Scholars Conference (UChicago Booth), Workshop on “Causal Inference with Spatial Data” (RWI), Development and Political Economics Graduate Student Conference (Berkeley & Stanford), Yale Economic History Graduate Student Conference, Economic and Business History Society Conference, CIREQ PhD Students’ Conference, Warwick Economics PhD Conference, and Workshop on “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Labor Market” (Berkeley & Princeton).
<page_number>iv</page_number>
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | <page_number>iv</page_number>
To the four exceptional women who have been my pillars of strength throughout this journey: To my mother, whose unwavering love and encouragement have instilled in me a relentless passion for lifelong learning and intellectual exploration; to my sister and grandmother, who have provided a steadfast foundation of stability and warmth; and to Elisa, whose boundless love and support have bridged the vast Atlantic for the past five years.
<page_number>V</page_number>
# Contents
Abstract .................................................................................................................................................................................. iii
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................................. iv
## I Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery
1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................. 2
2 Historical Context ....................................................................................................................................................... 8
2.1 Free Black Americans before 1865 .................................................................................................................. 8
2.2 Freedom of All Black Americans after 1865 .................................................................................................. 9
3 Data and a New Method to Measure a Family’s Exposure to Slavery and Jim Crow ........................................ 11
3.1 Measuring How Long a Family Was Enslaved ................................................................................................. 11
3.2 Measuring the Exposure to State-Led Oppression During Jim Crow ................................................................ 13
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | 3.3 Linked Data .......................................................................................................................................................... 14
3.4 Sample .................................................................................................................................................................. 15
4 A Simple Model of Black Economic Progress After Slavery .................................................................................. 17
4.1 Model setup .......................................................................................................................................................... 17
4.2 The Intergenerational Effect of Being Enslaved Until the Civil War ....................................................... 18
5 Socioeconomic Gaps between Descendants of Free and Enslaved Families .................................................. 19
5.1 Evolution of the Free-Enslaved Gap until 1940 ............................................................................................. 19
5.2 The Free-Enslaved Gap in the 21st Century .................................................................................................. 21
5.3 Interpreting the Free-Enslaved Gap .............................................................................................................. 23
6 The Importance of Geography in Shaping Black Economic Progress After Slavery .................................. 23
6.1 States’ Effect on Black Economic Progress After Slavery ............................................................................. 23
6.2 The Free-Enslaved Gap is Driven by Geography .......................................................................................... 27
6.3 Lower Bound for the Causal Effect of Geography .......................................................................................... 28
| Chapter | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | The Jim Crow Effect | 29 |
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | | Chapter | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | The Jim Crow Effect | 29 |
| 6.4 | Location of Freedom and the Question of Exogeneity | 31 |
| 7 | The Jim Crow Effect | 31 |
| 7.1 | State Institutions and Black Economic Progress After Slavery | 31 |
| 7.2 | Border Discontinuity Design | 31 |
| 7.3 | Validation of the Border Discontinuity Design | 36 |
| 8 | The Mechanism of Limited Access to Education | 40 |
| 8.1 | Jim Crow Regulated Black Family’s Access to Education | 40 |
| 8.2 | Access to Schools Mediated Jim Crow’s Negative Effects | 42 |
| 9 | The Geography of Black Economic Progress in the Twenty-First Century | 44 |
| 10 | Conclusion | 46 |
**II Intergenerational Mobility and Assortative Mating** | 48
|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | 49 |
| 2 | Linking the Historical Records of Women | 52 |
| 2.1 | Data on the Maiden Names of Women | 52 |
| 2.2 | Our Panel of 36 Million Americans | 53 |
| 2.3 | Linking Method | 55 |
| 3 | Intergenerational Mobility and Women in US History | 56 |
| 3.1 | Main Estimates of Intergenerational Mobility | 56 |
| 3.2 | Additional Estimates: Mobility in Literacy | 59 |
| 3.3 | Mothers’ Contribution to Intergenerational Mobility | 61 |
| 3.4 | Intergenerational Mobility & Assortative Mating | 62 |
| 4 | Conclusion | 63 |
**III Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Racial Income Gaps among Women since 1950** | 66
|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction | 67 |
| 2 | Empirical Strategy | 69 |
| 2.1 | Main Estimation | 69 |
| 2.2 | Decomposition | 71 |
| 3 | Data | 73 |
| 3.1 | Household and Family structure | 75 |
3.2 Non-Employment .................................................. 75
3.3 Educational and occupational attainment .................. 77
3.4 Income levels .................................................. 77
4 Results .................................................. 79
4.1 Income Level Gaps ........................................ 80
4.2 Income Rank Gaps ........................................ 82
5 Decomposition of Income Gaps .................................. 83
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | 5 Decomposition of Income Gaps .................................. 83
5.1 Unmasking Regional Heterogeneity ......................... 83
5.2 Accounting for Positional and Distributional Forces .. 84
5.3 Accounting for Partners’ Income .......................... 86
5.4 Accounting for Observable Characteristics ............. 87
6 Conclusion .................................................. 89
**IV Appendix** 104
1 Appendix to “Jim Crow and Black Economic Progress After Slavery” .................................................. 105
1.1 Additional Results ........................................ 105
1.2 Robustness Checks ........................................ 127
1.3 Data Appendix ........................................ 148
1.4 Model Appendix ........................................ 171
2 Appendix to “Intergenerational Mobility and Assortative Mating” .................................................. 173
2.1 Data Appendix ........................................ 173
2.2 Weighted results ........................................ 175
3 Appendix to “Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Racial Income Gaps among Women since 1950” .......................... 177
3.1 Figures .................................................. 177
3.2 Tables .................................................. 181
I. JIM CROW AND BLACK ECONOMIC PROGRESS AFTER SLAVERY
<page_number>1</page_number>
**JIM CROW AND BLACK ECONOMIC PROGRESS AFTER SLAVERY**
LUKAS ALTHOFF (PRINCETON) & HUGO REICHARDT (LSE)
**1 Introduction**
The socioeconomic gap between Black and white Americans is one of the most persistent features of US society. For example, Black Americans today own over 80 percent less wealth than white Americans on average (Derenoncourt et al., 2022). Black Americans are also 40 percent less likely to hold a college degree than white Americans (US Department of Education, 2019), and their median incomes are 50 percent lower (Bayer and Charles, 2018). |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Although racial disparities have narrowed considerably over the past two centuries, the progress has been slow.
One possible explanation for the lower socioeconomic status of Black Americans is the US’s particular history of institutionalized racial oppression. Throughout the country’s early history, slavery was legal—until around 1800 in the North and until the end of the Civil War (1861–1865) in the South. However, slavery was not the end of institutionalized oppression. Soon after slavery, Southern state governments passed a mounting number of racially oppressive laws designed to limit the economic progress of newly freed Black families—a regime called Jim Crow. States’ Jim Crow regimes instituted racial segregation (e.g., of schools and public transport), Black voter disenfranchisement (e.g., literacy requirements and poll taxes), and restricted the geographic mobility of Black Americans (e.g., vagrancy laws and enticement laws).¹ After almost 100 years, the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s outlawed racial discrimination and ended Jim Crow, making it “one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history” (U.S. Senate, 2019).
This paper studies whether and to what extent Black families’ historical exposure to slavery and Jim Crow continues to shape US racial inequality. In sum, we find that the socioeconomic status of black families today depends strongly on their historical exposure to racially oppressive institutions. Black families left slavery with little or no measurable physical or human capital. We show that after slavery, Black families’ economic progress critically depended on the state in which they were freed. Most families enslaved until the Civil War were freed in the southernmost states. After slavery ended, those states implemented the most severe forms of Jim Crow institutions. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | After slavery ended, those states implemented the most severe forms of Jim Crow institutions. Our results suggest that the economic progress of families enslaved until the Civil War would have been substantially faster between 1865 and today if it had not been for their high exposure to Jim Crow. We highlight the denial of equal access to education as a critical factor
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¹Throughout this paper, we use the term “Jim Crow” to refer to institutions that limited Black Americans’ civil rights. Extralegal factors—such as lynchings or employer discrimination that often went above and beyond the letter of the law—do not fall under our definition of Jim Crow. In terms of measurement, we focus on state institutions, ignoring less prevalent instances of local Jim Crow-like ordinances.
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that made Jim Crow detrimental to Black economic progress.
We overcome the challenge of measuring each individual family’s historical exposure to slavery and Jim Crow by tracing their census and administrative records from 1850 to 2000 using automated record-linking methods (Abramitzky et al., 2019).<sup>2</sup> First, to measure a family’s exposure to slavery, we leverage that the 1850 and 1860 censuses did not record enslaved people. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Therefore, we argue that we can identify families freed before the Civil War as those having ancestors recorded in the 1850 or 1860 census; others are classified as enslaved until the Civil War.<sup>3</sup> We validate this method by developing a new surname-based approach to determine how likely a family was to have been enslaved until the Civil War (Ager et al., 2021).<sup>4</sup> Second, to measure a family’s exposure to Jim Crow, we use our linked sample to observe where a family’s ancestors were freed from slavery.<sup>5</sup> Where a family was freed is a good reflection of their exposure to state-level Jim Crow institutions over the subsequent 75 years because Black Americans’ geographic mobility was low before 1940 (Boustan, 2016), especially for those under intense Jim Crow regimes.<sup>6</sup> We measure a state’s Jim Crow intensity using a newly constructed dataset of 800 Jim Crow laws and a preexisting composite index of state-level racial oppression.<sup>7</sup>
While exposure to oppression under slavery and Jim Crow was correlated, the two institutions’ different geographies allow us to disentangle their effects. As a result of the rapid southern expansion of the US plantation economy, the longer a family was enslaved, the more likely they were to be concentrated in the southernmost states—which would become the epicenter of Jim Crow. State-specific laws formed Jim Crow regimes; in contrast, slavery was an institution that transcended state borders. Jim Crow restrictions on geographic mobility made it difficult to escape those regimes, even in state border regions. Therefore, families who had been enslaved close to each other sometimes began to experience drastically different institutions of racial oppression under Jim Crow.
We proceed in three steps to assess and disentangle the long-run effects of slavery and Jim Crow. First, we divide our sample into two groups and document socioeconomic gaps between them: Black families
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | First, we divide our sample into two groups and document socioeconomic gaps between them: Black families
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<sup>2</sup>Using their name, year and place of birth, and race, we follow individuals across full-count census records from 1850 to 1940. We use the census’s information on interrelationships among individuals in the same household to build family trees based on those linked records. We also link families to Social Security mortality records that allow us to measure socioeconomic outcomes at the neighborhood level.
<sup>3</sup>Linking the historical records of women remains difficult, allowing us to follow only the paternal line of ancestry. We estimate that intermarriage between families freed before 1865 and families freed in 1865 likely attenuates our estimates of the socioeconomic gaps between them in 1940 by one-third.
<sup>4</sup>This approach leverages changes in the distribution of last names in the census from 1860 to 1870—before and after the inclusion of newly freed Black families—assigning a probability of having been enslaved until 1865 to each last name. For example, the last name “Freedman” did not exist in 1860, but many newly freed families chose it in 1865. In contrast, the last name “Du Bois” became ten times less frequent in the census after it included the formerly Enslaved in 1870.
<sup>5</sup>As a family’s location of freedom, we use their ancestor’s state of birth or county of residence as observed in the 1870 census. We only use this information for families who were enslaved until 1865.
<sup>6</sup>Mobility was low due to institutional factors—such as Jim Crow laws that limited labor mobility (Roback, 1984; Naidu, 2010)—and economic factors—such as high migration costs (Carrington et al., 1996) or the elusiveness of opportunities in potential destinations (Akbar et al., 2020; Derenoncourt, 2022).
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | <sup>7</sup>The composite index is based on a state’s enslaved population share in 1860; its share of sharecroppers who were Black in 1930; its number of disfranchisement devices; and its share of congressional delegates that signed the Southern Manifesto (Baker, 2022).
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who had higher exposure to both slavery *and* Jim Crow because they were enslaved until the Civil War (“Enslaved”); and families who were less exposed to both institutions because they were free before the Civil War (“Free”).\(^8\) Second, we assess the importance of state-specific factors—such as Jim Crow regimes—by decomposing this “Free-Enslaved gap” into variation in Black economic progress within and across ancestor states.\(^9\) Last, using a border discontinuity design, we isolate the effect that states’ Jim Crow regimes had on Black economic progress from other factors that may vary across states, such as economic activity, culture, or climate.
Our first key result is that today, Black families enslaved until the Civil War continue to have considerably lower education, income, and wealth than Black families freed before the Civil War. These Free-Enslaved gaps are almost half as large as the corresponding Black-white gaps. While immediately after slavery, the Free-Enslaved gaps were even larger, their narrowing has been much slower than one would expect under standard levels of intergenerational mobility.\(^{10}\)
Our second key result is that state-specific factors drive the long-run persistence of the Free-Enslaved gap. First, gaps due to direct exposure to slavery itself dissipated by 1940. In 1870, five years after the end of slavery, the socioeconomic status of recently freed families was far below that of families freed earlier, even for individuals from the same state. By 1940, those large Free-Enslaved gaps vanished conditional on the state in which their ancestors lived during slavery. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | By 1940, those large Free-Enslaved gaps vanished conditional on the state in which their ancestors lived during slavery. Second, families enslaved until the Civil War were concentrated in the states where Black Americans fared worse after slavery. The difference in the two groups’ geographic distribution fully explains the persistently lower socioeconomic status of families enslaved until the Civil War. In sum, state-specific factors were the critical force that perpetuated the socioeconomic disparities that slavery had created among Black families in the long run.
To identify the likely mechanism behind the importance of state-specific factors—namely, the effect of Jim Crow regimes—we use a regression discontinuity design that compares the socioeconomic outcomes of Black families freed across state borders with more or less stringent Jim Crow regimes. By focusing on counties close to state borders, we isolate the role of institutions from factors that transcend those borders.
Our third key result is that Black families freed in states with more oppressive regimes experienced sharply lower rates of economic progress starting in the Jim Crow era (1877–1964). The resulting differences in socioeconomic status are increasing in the differences in Jim Crow intensity across a border. For example,
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\(^8\)Using aggregate counts of the Black population starting in 1790 and assuming that free Black families’ population growth equaled that of white families, we approximate that the average free Black family was freed 50 years before the Civil War—around 1815.
\(^9\)If the main reason for the long-run persistence of the Free-Enslaved gap were differential exposure to slavery, we would expect this gap to largely reflect within-ancestor state differences between families freed before versus during the Civil War. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | In contrast, if the Free-Enslaved gap were driven by differential exposure to the state-specific factors, we would expect the gap to largely reflect across-state differences between families, irrespective of when they were free.
\(^{10}\)We find that social upward mobility is far lower for Black than white Americans, especially among descendants of the Enslaved (see Appendix Figure 41). We also show that there is a much faster convergence between the economic status of white families without any measurable physical or human capital in 1870 and families with average outcomes in 1870 (see Appendix Figure 74).
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consistent with Louisiana’s Jim Crow legislation being far more extensive than Texas’s, we find that families freed in Louisiana attained 1.2 fewer years of education by 1940 than families freed only a few miles away in Texas. The magnitudes of those border discontinuities are virtually identical to the general state differences in how families fared after slavery, suggesting that Jim Crow single-handedly shaped the geography of Black economic progress.
We validate this border discontinuity design by showing that 1) differences in the socioeconomic status of formerly enslaved people only arise with the beginning of Jim Crow (circa 1880), 2) those differences are increasing in the intensity of states’ Jim Crow regimes, 3) before Jim Crow there are no cross-border differences in economic, agricultural, or demographic characteristics, and 4) Jim Crow regimes did not negatively affect white families. Basing our design on ancestor location before 1865—rather than the current location—leaves little room for selection, given that enslaved people had no say in their place of residence.
Our main identifying assumption is that an enslaved person’s birthplace is exogenous to future generations’ potential socioeconomic outcomes. Historical evidence supports this assumption. Enslaved people had no freedom of movement before the Civil War, leaving no room for self-selection into location. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Enslaved people had no freedom of movement before the Civil War, leaving no room for self-selection into location. Selection could only have occurred through forced migration, to which slaveholder migration and the domestic slave trade equally contributed (Steckel and Ziebarth, 2013). Slaveholders were generally non-selective in moving all their enslaved people with them (Fogel and Engerman, 1974; Pritchett, 2001; Tadman, 2008; Pritchett, 2019). Selective slave trade is only evident in the small sugar cultivation areas. However, the physical characteristics that led to selection into slave trade are likely unrelated to human capital today. The evidence from our regression discontinuity design offers strong support for this assumption.
To understand how Jim Crow regimes slowed Black economic progress, we classify Jim Crow laws by topic and find that the largest number pertain to education. Education is the target of 227 laws—over one-quarter of all Jim Crow laws passed throughout the South. Those laws racially segregated schools, reduced educational resources allocated to Black children, shortened term lengths for Black schools, and prevented Black Americans from participating in the local bodies that governed education. Our analysis of
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11We limit our sample to families enslaved until 1865.
12In principle, selection could also arise through differences in the slaveholders who choose to migrate. However, for selection to arise, the slaveholder’s decision would need to be correlated with the potential outcomes of their enslaved people—a scenario we cannot rule out but deem unlikely.
13Sugar cultivation accounted for only 6 percent of the rural enslaved population (Tadman, 1977, 1979). By the nature of the work required, enslaved people there tended to be physically stronger and more likely to be male (Phillips, 1918).
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | 14Contrary to the most plausible scenario for positive selection, we find that families freed in the Louisiana sugar areas achieved lower socioeconomic status by 1940 than families freed in other areas.
15Because our RDD estimates fully capture the differences in the causal state effects, any relevant selection would need to occur sharply at the border. Such forms of selection are implausible given that enslaved people were—if anything—selectively forced to migrate to specific locations based on the crops cultivated there. We verify that crops do not discontinuously change across state borders. We also verify that the observable characteristics of enslaved people—such as their age in 1860 or their literacy in 1870—did not discontinuously vary across borders, ruling out selection on observable characteristics directly.
16Education as the main target is followed by public transport (150 laws), employment (138 laws), public facilities (106 laws), marriage (85 laws), and suffrage (29 laws). We pool the remaining 55 laws that do not fall into either of those categories under “other.”
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the content of these laws suggests that Jim Crow directly restricted Black Americans’ *access* to education, motivating our exploration of access to education as an essential mechanism in the persistent effect of Jim Crow.
We assess whether access to education mediated the effect of Jim Crow on outcomes in the long run by leveraging a natural experiment in school provision in the early 20th century. Specifically, we compare the education of children depending on whether their ancestors were freed in a county that would receive one of 5,000 schools built by the Rosenwald program (1914–1931) by the time the children were of school age (Aaronson and Mazumder, 2011). |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | We find that the supply of schools had persistent positive effects on the economic progress of Black families, especially in the most oppressive states.¹⁷ Gaining access to a Rosenwald school closed 80 percent of the education gap caused by exposure to an intense Jim Crow regime. We find that the schools not only increased the education of those who had access but also improved the economic conditions of their children in the long run—for example, college completion increased by 40 percent.
This paper contributes to our understanding of whether and how historical institutions affect economic outcomes in the long run. Acemoglu et al. (2002), Dell (2010), Donaldson (2018), and Dell and Olken (2019) show that institutions can lastingly transform regions. In this paper, we develop innovative methods to study the impact of institutions on *individual families* rather than regions and apply them in the context of US historical racial oppression. Such individual-level evidence allows for the geographic mobility of families, which attenuates regional differences in the long run. Tracing the effect of institutions on families can also generate novel insights into the mechanisms that drive various forms of persistence. We leverage quasi-experimental variation in school construction in the South to show that mere access to a school closes 80 percent of the education gap caused by Jim Crow.
This paper further contributes to the evidence of the long-run effects that oppressive institutions can have on racial inequality. Within and outside of the US, regions that relied on slave labor continue to have lower and more unequally distributed incomes (Nunn, 2008), lower upward mobility (Berger, 2018), larger racial disparities (O’Connell, 2012; Bertocchi and Dimico, 2014), and higher levels of racial resentment against the formerly enslaved (Acharya et al., 2018).¹⁸ Evidence of how racially oppressive institutions affect individual Black families in the long run is scarce. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Sacerdote (2005) uses Southern place of birth as a proxy for being enslaved until the Civil War and shows that Black descendants of this group continued to have lower socioeconomic status than those freed earlier. By combining newly available linked records,
---
¹⁷A Black child with access to a Rosenwald school attained 0.3 years more education than a child without access. In the most oppressive states, the effect was 0.9 years.
¹⁸Those locations also have lower productivity (Mitchener and McLean, 2003). In Brazil, a location’s past reliance on slavery caused weaker institutions and higher inequality until today (Fujiwara et al., 2019).
<page_number>6</page_number>
exogenous variation in ancestor location, and new details on state institutions, we assess why Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War still experience lower socioeconomic outcomes. We show that after 1940, the single reason those differences persist is that the most strict Jim Crow regimes arose in the states where Black families enslaved until the Civil War were concentrated. This result implies that systemic discrimination—the higher exposure to ongoing discrimination *because of past discrimination* (Bohren et al., 2022)—is at the core of slavery’s persisting legacy.
This paper also enhances our understanding of geographic disparities in intergenerational mobility. Historically and in recent decades, upward mobility has been lower in the South than in any other US region (Olivetti and Paserman, 2015; Chetty et al., 2014a). Chetty and Hendren (2018) analyze children whose families move across places to show that locations *caused* low upward mobility in the South rather than being a result of selection. This paper shows that institutions can be a crucial force underlying places’ causal effect on intergenerational mobility. We show that a key channel through which the institution of Jim Crow reduced Black Americans’ economic mobility is the restricted access to education (see also Card et al., 2022). |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | In addition, we develop a novel empirical strategy to assess a place’s effect on upward mobility based on the geographic *immobility* of a specific population rather than their mobility. We find that a state’s capacity to generate upward mobility is highly persistent: our estimates (1865–1940) have a strong correlation (0.617, $p = 0.000$) with states’ causal effects on the intergenerational mobility of low-income groups in recent decades (Chetty and Hendren, 2018). This high persistence is consistent with rigid cultural, economic, and institutional factors that set boundaries to economic opportunity (Acharya et al., 2018).
Lastly, this paper contributes to the historical literature on the evolution of Black economic progress after the end of slavery in the US. Margo (1991) argues that beyond market forces such as the supply of and demand for educated Black workers, one of the main reasons for the persistence of Black-white gaps in education was the barriers faced by Black parents, which in turn diminished the economic opportunities of their children. Our results show that this “intergenerational drag” of slavery itself was quantitatively important for around three generations but diminished over time. We extend Margo’s model of Black economic progress to encompass the racially oppressive institutions after slavery, which we show to be decisive in the long run. The dependence of Black economic progress on institutional factors is consistent with the seminal work of Du Bois (1935), Woodward (1955), Ransom and Sutch (2001), and Wright (2013) who highlight that when and where their environment allowed for it, Black families did make rapid progress—such as in the Reconstruction era (1865–1877). Consistent with that, our evidence from the Rosenwald schools suggests that it was not a lack of demand for education among Black children in the Jim Crow South but a lack of *access* to education that slowed their human capital accumulation (see also Aaronson
<page_number>7</page_number>
and Mazumder, 2011).
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | <page_number>7</page_number>
and Mazumder, 2011).
## 2 Historical Context
This section provides some historical context for the evolution of racially oppressive institutions in the US—from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond.
### 2.1 Free Black Americans before 1865
In 1860, just before the Civil War (1861–1865) that led to the abolition of slavery, 4 million enslaved and 0.4 million free Black people lived in America. Enslaved people have existed on American soil since the country’s colonial origins (Sowell, 1978). The roots of the free Black population may trace back to 1619 when settlers in Virginia purchased the first 20 Black people. Little is known about their fate, but it is likely that some of them were treated as servants who had to work for a fixed term and gained freedom afterward (Frazier, 1949). Around 1660, both law and practice had changed, implying that virtually all Black individuals who arrived in the colonies were enslaved for life. From 1662 onwards, the law also mandated that a child would inherit their legal (i.e., free or enslaved) status from their mother regardless of race.
For some enslaved people, the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) provided a road to freedom. Responding to a need for troops and laborers, the British governor promised freedom to all enslaved willing and able to serve the British. It is estimated that up to 100,000 enslaved people ran away from plantations to do so (Schama, 2006). After the war, many remained in the US as free persons. As a result, the free Black population in some states increased dramatically.
The Revolutionary War also brought a spirit of egalitarianism, challenging the institution of slavery in some regions. In the North, the abolitionist movement spread quickly after the war. While only a few Black people lived free of slavery before the Revolutionary War, most Northern states adopted gradual Emancipation laws after the war. New Jersey was the last Northern state to do so in 1804.
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | New Jersey was the last Northern state to do so in 1804.
In the South, the path to freedom was narrow, especially in the Lower South. All Southern states except North Carolina allowed masters to free (“manumit”) their enslaved people by 1790, but the practice was employed to different degrees across regions. In the Upper South, the first wave of manumissions occurred between 1783 and 1793, the first decade after the Revolutionary War. Motivated by anti-slavery beliefs, most manumitters freed all their enslaved people at once. However, manumission gradually became more
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19The Lower South comprises Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas. The Upper South comprises Delaware, Washington, DC, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The North comprises all other states.
<page_number>8</page_number>
selective and turned into a reward system designed to uphold slavery (Wolf, 2006). By 1860, 0.2 million of the 1.8 million Black Americans in the Upper South were free (11.1 percent). The Lower South did not see a similar manumission wave after the war, as manumissions there were usually limited to masters’ “illicit offspring, special favorites, or least productive slaves” (Berlin, 1974). The free Black population of the Lower South mainly originated from refugees who fled from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) and the purchase of Louisiana from France, which had a sizable free Black population. By 1860, 40,000 of the 2.5 million Black Americans in the Lower South were free (1.6 percent).
The legal and socioeconomic status of the Free varied greatly across locations and over time before 1865 (Sowell, 1978). In most states, free Black Americans were deprived of the right to vote and to hold political office. However, their legally protected property rights were respected in most cases. With the limited freedom they enjoyed, some free Black families could accumulate modest wealth and social status. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | With the limited freedom they enjoyed, some free Black families could accumulate modest wealth and social status. Most of them, however, lived in poverty “under conditions barely distinguishable from those of the mass of slaves” (Berlin, 1974). Their economic status varied considerably across the country and, perhaps surprisingly, tended to be better further South (Berlin, 1976). In the North, free Black families were concentrated in cities where they suffered from competition with and hostility from white laborers (Frazier, 1949). Most free Black families in the South lived in rural areas, working as farmhands and casual laborers (Berlin, 1974).
### 2.2 Freedom of All Black Americans after 1865
By the beginning of the Civil War (1861–1865), the enslaved population was concentrated in the Lower South (see Figure 1). The free Black population, in contrast, was concentrated in the North and the Upper South. These differences in geographic location exposed them to different institutional regimes after slavery.
The Civil War led to the emancipation of enslaved families, giving all Black Americans the same legal status. The average free Black family had likely already been free for around 50 years.²⁰ For the first 12 years after the Civil War—the Reconstruction era (1865–1877)—the Union Army occupied the South. Black Americans experienced unprecedented economic progress under Reconstruction (Foner, 2014). New schools and colleges were built to educate Black Americans throughout the South. Black men participated politically, casting their votes in high numbers and serving in public office (Logan, 2020). Throughout Reconstruction, Black economic and political progress was met with violent opposition from white Southerners (Du Bois, 1935; Foner, 1963; Blackmon, 2009).
In 1877, the Union troops left the South, abandoning the project of Reconstruction. The disenfranchise-
---
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | In 1877, the Union troops left the South, abandoning the project of Reconstruction. The disenfranchise-
---
²⁰Fifty years is an estimate derived from aggregate counts of the Black population starting in 1790 and assuming that free Black families’ population growth equaled that of white families.
<page_number>9</page_number>
**FIGURE 1: Population by County in 1860**
(A) Number of Enslaved
(B) Number of Free
<img>A map of the United States showing the number of enslaved Black Americans by county in 1860. The map is color-coded to represent different ranges of enslaved population sizes. Darker shades of red represent more than 10,000 enslaved people, medium shades represent 1,001-10,000, light shades represent 1-1,000, and lightest shades represent 0. The legend indicates that no data is available for some counties. The map is truncated to omit the western half of the country, which at the time was only sparsely populated. The legend is located in the bottom right corner of the map.</img>
<img>A map of the United States showing the number of free Black Americans by county in 1860. The map is color-coded to represent different ranges of free population sizes. Darker shades of red represent more than 1,000 free people, medium shades represent 101-1,000, light shades represent 1-100, and lightest shades represent 0. The legend indicates that no data is available for some counties. The map is truncated to omit the western half of the country, which at the time was only sparsely populated. The legend is located in the bottom right corner of the map.</img>
**Notes:** This figure shows the population sizes of enslaved Black Americans (Panel A) and free Black Americans (Panel B) in the 1860 census. The maps are truncated to omit the western half of the country, which at the time was only sparsely populated. Appendix Figure 84 shows the full maps for 1790 and 1860.
The government of Black people through informal and legal means led to massive declines in Black political participation (Kousser, 1974; Naidu, 2012). |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Many free Black Americans lost their higher social status and left the South (Woodson, 1918).
Black Americans who remained in the South after Reconstruction faced increasing oppression through the rise of Jim Crow (1877–1964). Jim Crow laws governed almost every aspect of Black life. Schools, workplaces, public transport, medical facilities, and parks were racially segregated (Murray, 1950). Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other rules limited Black suffrage (Naidu, 2012; Walton et al., 2012). Enticement laws, contract enforcement laws, and emigrant-agent laws prevented Black workers from seeking economic opportunities with new employers or in states outside the South (Roback, 1984; Naidu, 2010). Vagrancy laws criminalized the unemployment of Black people (Blackmon, 2009). In addition to institutionalized oppression, various informal means of excluding Black Americans spread through the South and beyond.
From 1910 to 1940, many Black Americans started to leave the (Upper) South in the first wave of the Great Migration. Black families from the Lower South only participated in this migration in small numbers before 1940, both because Jim Crow limited their geographic mobility and because migration was more costly for them (Roback, 1984; Naidu, 2010; Carrington et al., 1996). While the Civil Rights Movement successfully fought oppression starting in the mid-1950s, the Great Migration continued until the end of the movement in the late 1960s. By then, six million Black Americans had left the South (Boustan, 2016). How-
ever, opportunities in the North proved elusive to Black families (Akbar et al., 2020; Derenoncourt, 2022). In addition, even after the achievements of the 1960s, old forms of racial oppression have persisted, and new forms—such as mass incarceration and “color-blind” voter suppression—have arisen since (Western, 2006; Alexander, 2010; Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Darity et al., 2016). |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Progress in narrowing racial gaps in socioeconomic status has largely stalled since the 1960s (Bayer and Charles, 2018; Althoff, 2021; Derenoncourt et al., 2022).
### 3 Data and a New Method to Measure a Family’s Exposure to Slavery and Jim Crow
A major empirical challenge we overcome in this paper is to measure a Black family’s exposure to slavery and Jim Crow. We construct family histories for Black Americans in the census between 1850 to 2000 and develop new methods to measure the two critical components of a family’s historical exposure to institutionalized oppression: how long a family was enslaved and where they were freed, determining the intensity of the Jim Crow regime under which they likely lived.
#### 3.1 Measuring How Long a Family Was Enslaved
To measure how long a family was enslaved, we leverage that the 1850 and 1860 censuses did not record enslaved people.21
**Main method.** We identify Black Americans free before 1865 (“the Free”) as those who were (1) recorded in the 1850 or 1860 census or (2) born in a state that had already abolished slavery; Black Americans who were born in slave states before 1865 and cannot be traced back to ancestors in the 1850 or 1860 census are classified as enslaved until 1865 (“the Enslaved”).22 We then carry this information forward to their descendants. To do so, we build family trees using the information on family interrelationships for members of the same household from the census and by linking individuals’ census and administrative records from 1850 and 2000.
This classification strategy accurately identifies whether a Black family’s ancestors were enslaved until 1865. In principle, if a family cannot be linked back to the 1850 or 1860 census, this could either mean that they were enslaved until 1865 or that they could not be linked using automated methods—for example, because their name was misspelled in one census. Hence, in the South, we inevitably misclassify some
---
21These are the only pre-1865 census decades with individual-level data.
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | 21These are the only pre-1865 census decades with individual-level data.
22We refer to Black families free before 1865 as “the Free” even though they or their ancestors may have been enslaved in previous decades. We refer to those enslaved until 1865 as “the (formerly) Enslaved.” We choose this terminology to avoid confusion engendered by the sometimes-used terms “Freemen” (Free) and “Freedmen” (formerly Enslaved). We avoid the term “slave” and capitalize “Free” and “Enslaved” when used as nouns to be respectful of the people we study.
<page_number>11</page_number>
Black families who were free before 1865. However, census records show that only 6 percent of the Southern Black population were free in 1860, many of whom we correctly classify as such. As a result, we compare a group that was free with almost certainty in 1860 with a group of which at least 94 percent were enslaved. Therefore, the potential for attenuation bias due to imperfect linking rates is minimal.\textsuperscript{23}
Our classification method has two significant advantages over previous research, which typically relied on birthplaces to identify how long a family was likely enslaved. First, because the census only provides information on birthplaces for a person and their parents, the intergenerational effects of slavery beyond the second generation cannot be studied in the census cross-section. Our panels allow us to follow families until today.\textsuperscript{24} Second and more importantly, relying on a person’s birthplace can only identify free Black families born in the North. However, 50 percent of all Black families freed before 1865 lived in the South. Our method correctly identifies a large number of those families. Measuring how long a family was enslaved and where it was freed is crucial to determining what role slavery, Jim Crow, and their interaction play in shaping the persistent effects of institutionalized racial oppression.\textsuperscript{25}
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | While the Free-Enslaved gap accurately captures differences based on the enslavement status of a family’s male ancestry line, we show that it is also a lower bound for differences that would arise if the entire family tree had the same enslavement status. Because women tended to change their last names upon marriage, automated linking methods do not allow us to directly follow a family’s female ancestry line. An advantage of considering only male ancestry is that it avoids bias through selective marriage. A disadvantage is that we do not know which fraction of one’s ancestors were enslaved until 1865 and which fraction was freed earlier. We show that the male ancestry line provides a valuable proxy for a family’s share of ancestors enslaved, making the Free-Enslaved gap a lower bound for the actual group differences between families with high vs. low shares of ancestors enslaved.\textsuperscript{26}
**Alternative method.** We develop a second strategy to identify descendants of the Free and the Enslaved based solely on last names. We use the change in the distribution over last names before 1865, when the census included only free Black Americans, to after 1865, when it included all Black Americans. This approach allows us to use the full (rather than only the linked) sample of Black Americans in the census. The two approaches yield Free-Enslaved classifications that are highly correlated.\textsuperscript{27}
\textsuperscript{23}In Appendix 1.2, we show that our results are robust to 1) correcting for state-specific rates of misclassification and 2) excluding the (small) Southern states where a large share of Black Americans was free before the Civil War (Delaware, DC, and Maryland).
\textsuperscript{24}This extension also lets us use the rich data on education, income, and wealth in the 1940 census.
\textsuperscript{25}See Appendix Figure 83 for average socioeconomic outcomes among descendants of the Enslaved and the Free by region of origin.
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | \textsuperscript{26}In Appendix 1.2, we derive this result theoretically and empirically approximate the difference between the two measures. Inter-marriage was likely rare before 1940 due to the differences in the two groups’ geographic concentration. We estimate that for the first generation born after 1865, the socioeconomic gaps between Black Americans whose ancestors only descend from Enslaved vs. Free Black ancestors is around 15 percent larger than the Free-Enslaved gap. In later generations, this difference is almost certainly more significant.
\textsuperscript{27}See Appendix Figure 81.
<page_number>12</page_number>
While some last names were common among the Free and the Enslaved, others were characteristic of one group. For example, the last name “Du Bois” was relatively frequent among free Black families in the 1860 census. However, with the inclusion of the families newly freed in 1865 in the 1870 census, Du Bois became ten times less frequent—an indication that having this last name meant a person likely descended from the Free. In contrast, the last name “Freedman” did not exist in the 1860 census but appeared in the 1870 census after some newly freed families chose it as their new last name. Thus, Black families called Freedman were likely enslaved until 1865.
This alternative classification method trades off accuracy in favor of coverage. Based on this probabilistic measure, we expect the resulting Free-Enslaved gaps to be subject to attenuation bias, making them appear smaller than they are in truth. In contrast to our main method, however, this classification can be applied to the entire population of Black Americans rather than being limited to those we can link back in time.
This classification also allows us to identify descendants of the Enslaved in non-census data that include last names. We are collaborating with one of the primary credit score providers in the US to extend our results to 2022.
### 3.2 Measuring the Exposure to State-Led Oppression During Jim Crow
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | ### 3.2 Measuring the Exposure to State-Led Oppression During Jim Crow
Black families’ exposure to slavery and Jim Crow is highly correlated. Families enslaved until 1865 were also geographically concentrated in states that would become the epicenter of Jim Crow. In contrast, families freed earlier were concentrated in states that would adopt less intensive Jim Crow regimes. These different geographic distributions result from the rapid South expansion of the US plantation economy. The longer a family was enslaved, the more likely they were to be freed in the Lower South.
To measure a family’s exposure to Jim Crow, we use that record linkage allows us to observe the birth-place of its formerly enslaved ancestors. The state where a family was freed is a good proxy for exposure to state-level Jim Crow institutions over the subsequent 75 years. Their geographic mobility across states was low before 1940, especially for those in the most oppressive Jim Crow states.
We use three different measures of a state’s Jim Crow intensity. Our first measure is the number of Jim Crow laws that each state passed until 1950. For this measure, we collected data on 800 Jim Crow laws. Specifically, we digitized the laws recorded in “States’ Laws on Race and Color” (Murray, 1950)—a resource aiming to document all state laws that regulated race and color in 1950.28 We classify each law as discriminatory, not discriminatory, or anti-discriminatory based on the legislative text and sometimes the context provided by the author. We use discriminatory laws to proxy for Jim Crow laws. We also determine
28In an effort independent of ours, Cook et al. (2022) have also collected this data from (Murray, 1950).
<page_number>13</page_number>
each law’s domain, such as education, marriage, or public transport. We complete our dataset on Jim Crow laws by digitizing two crucial types of laws that Murray (1950) largely omitted: Laws on employment from Roback (1984); Cohen (1991) and laws on suffrage from Walton et al. (2012).
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Our second measure is a composite index of state-level racial oppression—the Historical Racial Regime (HRR) index. This index is a data-driven proxy of a state’s intensity of racial oppression from slavery to Jim Crow (Baker, 2022). The measure is a factor extracted from four components: a state’s population share enslaved in 1860; its share of sharecroppers who were Black in 1930; its number of disfranchisement devices; and its share of congressional delegates that signed the Southern Manifesto. A state’s HRR index is highly correlated with its number of Jim Crow laws ($\rho = 0.71$).
As our third measure we construct a composite index of a state’s Black school quality from data collected by Card and Krueger (1992). Specifically, we isolate the principle component of three state-specific school quality measures: teacher salaries, student-to-teacher ratios, and term lengths (all specific to Black children). Our index of Black school quality is highly correlated with the state’s HRR index ($\rho = -0.94$) and its number of Jim Crow laws ($\rho = -0.58$).
It is important to stress that Jim Crow regimes comprised de jure and de facto tactics, both of which critically contributed to the political exclusion of Black Americans (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2008). For example, Black suffrage was limited through laws, such as literacy tests or poll taxes, and non-legal means, such as Black voter intimidation and violence against Black Americans. No single measure perfectly captures those factors, in part because many cannot be observed in historical records. “There [was] more Jim Crowism practiced in the South than there [were] Jim Crow laws on the books” (p. 102 Woodward, 1955). Therefore, one should view the number of Jim Crow laws not as the golden truth of a state’s Jim Crow intensity but as an imperfect proxy. The outcome-based measures of the HRR index and Black school quality fill some gaps in measuring Jim Crow intensity that the number of Jim Crow laws likely leaves open.
### 3.3 Linked Data
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173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | ### 3.3 Linked Data
We use full-count census data for all available decades between 1850 and 1940 (Ruggles et al., 2020) and link observations across adjacent and non-adjacent decades using the automated linking methodology provided by Abramitzky et al. (2020). A person is linked from one census to another if their name, year of birth, and state of birth match and if the match is *unique* conditional on race. We use a method that allows for misspellings by matching names based on their phonetic sound (NYSIIS). Because women tend to change their last name upon marriage, only men can be linked over time.
The census also contains information on the relationship between individuals in the same household.
<page_number>14</page_number>
Most importantly, by observing a person in their parents’ household during childhood, we can build family trees based on this information. These family trees allow us to study the evolution of a family’s social, economic, and geographic mobility across generations. We study families’ outcomes in census records between 1870 (the first census to include all Black Americans) and 1940 (currently the most recent full-count census available). Our primary outcomes include education, income, and wealth. Over time, the census data provide increasingly rich information on those outcomes. Therefore, we focus particular attention on the rich information in the 1940 census.
To extend our analysis to the 21st century, we link the 1940 census to administrative death records between 1988 and 2005 (Goldstein et al., 2021). These records cover the near-universe of deaths among American citizens and contain the nine-digit ZIP code of the decedent’s residence at the time of death. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Nine-digit ZIP codes are highly granular indicators of location, which refer to a “segment or one side of a street” (USPS, 2021), allowing us to obtain rich information on the socioeconomic characteristics of a person’s neighborhood.29 We use National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) data on the distribution of education, income, and wealth by race within these areas to extend our analysis to the present day. We also examine broader measures of well-being such as health, mortality, residential segregation, evictions, and fatal police encounters. Last, we build a database of historical location characteristics, including agriculture, demographics, lynchings, segregation, railroad networks, and transportation costs.30
To extend our results even further, we are collaborating with one of the primary credit score providers in the US. We use our name-based method to identify Black individuals whose ancestors were enslaved until 1865. This data allows us to extend our estimates of the degree to which Black Americans continue to be affected by their ancestors’ institutionalized oppression to the present day (results forthcoming).
3.4 Sample
For our analysis, we focus on Black men aged 20 to 54. For two reasons, we also limit our sample to individuals who can be linked to their ancestors in 1880 or earlier. First, to identify a family who gained freedom before 1865 in a state that had not abolished slavery, it must be linkable to their ancestors in 1850 or 1860. Restricting the sample to Black Americans linkable to 1880 or earlier minimizes the bias that may result from comparing families who can be linked back in time easily (e.g., because they have unique names) with those who cannot. Second, this restriction excludes families who immigrated to the US after 1880 who might have experienced very different sets of oppressive institutions historically. Our results are
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|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | Our results are
---
29We map nine-digit ZIP codes into statistical areas, such as census blocks, which are small and designed to have socioeconomically homogeneous populations (Census Bureau, 2017). In Appendix 1.3, we describe the procedure for linking nine-digit ZIP codes to statistical areas.
30We describe this dataset in detail in Appendices 1.3–1.3.
<page_number>15</page_number>
not sensitive to this restriction.
For 1940, the latest year available, our sample of Black prime-age men consists of 155,813 descendants of families enslaved until 1865 and 9,325 descendants of families freed before 1865. We achieve a linking rate of 10 percent from 1870 to 1940—an essential benchmark because those links allow us to observe the state in which a Black family’s ancestors were freed from slavery via their birthplace in the 1870 census. Such imperfect linking rates are standard in the literature, especially for Black individuals. Despite the imperfect linking rate, our sample is highly balanced on observables (see Appendix Table 20 for balance checks). For example, the literacy rate of formerly enslaved families in our linked sample matches that of the 1870 census population: 20.4 percent. For free Black families in our linked sample, literacy is very close to that of the 1860 census population: 65.1 compared to 66.8 percent. From the 1940 census to administrative records in 2000, we can link 21,059 descendants of enslaved families and 1,591 descendants of free Black families.
**Potential Linking Bias.** In constructing our main sample, we rely on linking families across census records. One may be concerned that linking procedures introduce mechanical differences between families enslaved until 1865 and those freed earlier. The most plausible concern is that a person’s socioeconomic status depends on how many generations or decades they can be linked backward.31
**FIGURE 2: Average Outcomes in 1940**
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | **FIGURE 2: Average Outcomes in 1940**
<img>A line graph showing average outcomes in 1940 by the earliest year to which we can link them back to one of their ancestors. The dark blue line (left y-axis) shows the years of education; the light blue line (right y-axis) shows the total predicted income. The lines suggest no trend in outcomes outside of the break from 1860 to 1870. See Data Appendix 1.3 for details on the sample and data.</img>
**Notes:** This figure shows the average outcomes of Black Americans in 1940 by the earliest year to which we can link them back to one of their ancestors. The dark blue line (left y-axis) shows the years of education; the light blue line (right y-axis) shows the total predicted income. The lines suggest no trend in outcomes outside of the break from 1860 to 1870. See Data Appendix 1.3 for details on the sample and data.
31Linking rates are lower for Black than for white individuals. For example, for white men, Ager et al. (2021) achieve a linking rate of 20 percent from 1860 to 1870 or 1900. Our average linking rates are 12 percent between adjacent census decades and 20 percent from one census to any other census.
32For example, children of single mothers typically cannot be linked to their grandparents in earlier censuses because existing methods exclude women.
<page_number>16</page_number>
To examine the quantitative importance of this concern, we group Black Americans in 1940 by the earliest decade in which we can link them back to one of their ancestors and plot their average outcomes by group (see Figure 2). In 1870, Black families enslaved until 1865 were included in the census for the first time. Consistent with that change in sample composition, we observe a significant drop in average income and education for people who can be linked to ancestors in 1870 but not 1860 or 1850. Aside from this drop, there are no trends in income or education, suggesting that individuals who can be linked further do not have a mechanically higher socioeconomic status. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | The evidence suggests that the group differences estimated here are not affected by such a mechanical bias. To err on the side of caution, we limit our sample to individuals who can be linked back to 1880 or earlier throughout this paper.
4 A Simple Model of
Black Economic Progress After Slavery
We propose a simple model of Black economic progress to guide our interpretation of which forces shape the Free-Enslaved gap’s persistence in the long run. The framework incorporates intergenerational mobility, the effects of exposure to location-specific factors, (selective) migration, and the effect of delayed freedom. Throughout this paper, we use this model to answer the following questions: What factors determine the long-run persistence in the gap? How important was the differential exposure to location-specific factors among the Enslaved and the Free in shaping the gap? Is the persisting disadvantage faced by descendants of the Enslaved a causal effect of slavery or Jim Crow?
4.1 Model setup
Let $y_{i,t}$ denote the human capital—or any other outcome of interest—for person $i$ at time $t$. For simplicity, let there be two time periods, $t \in \{0,1\}$; the model is easily extendable to more time periods. We think of $t = 0$ as reflecting 1865, the year of Emancipation, and $t = 1$ as reflecting 1940, the last census year to which we can link families. We model $y_{i,t}$ to be determined by
$$y_{i,t} = \alpha_{i,t} + \gamma_{\ell(i,t)}^t + \rho y_{i,t-1} + \varepsilon_{i,t}$$
(1)
such that it depends on four factors: a factor capturing innate ability $\alpha_{i,t}$ with c.d.f. $F(\cdot)$, the family’s previous human capital $y_{i,t-1}$, their location $\ell(i,t) \in \mathcal{L}$, and a random error term $\varepsilon_{i,t}$ that satisfies $\mathbb{E}[\varepsilon_{i,t} \mid s_i, \alpha_{i,t}, \ell(i,t)] = 0$. Last, we define $\gamma_{\ell}^t$ as the effect of being exposed to location $\ell$ at time $t$. We model $y_{i,0}$ (the
<page_number>17</page_number>
starting condition) as
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | We model $y_{i,0}$ (the
<page_number>17</page_number>
starting condition) as
$$y_{i,0} = \alpha_{i,0} + \gamma_{\ell(i,0)}^0 - \delta s_i + \varepsilon_{i,0}, \tag{2}$$
where $s_i$ is an indicator for whether the family was enslaved until 1865. That is, in 1865, the outcomes depend on ability, location, and whether a person had been free before the Civil War. The parameter $\delta \geq 0$ captures any direct advantage that free Black Americans had relative to the Enslaved, such as access to education during slavery.\(^{33}\)
### 4.2 The Intergenerational Effect of Being Enslaved Until the Civil War
We define the effect of descending from ancestors who were enslaved until the Civil War ($s_i = 1$) as the expected difference between the two groups in the absence of differences in ability ($\alpha_{i,0}$). That is, we define the average treatment effect as
$$ATE \equiv \int (\mathbb{E}[y_{i,1} \mid s_i = 1, \alpha_{i,0}] - \mathbb{E}[y_{i,1} \mid s_i = 0, \alpha_{i,0}]) dF(\alpha_{i,0}). \tag{4}$$
Throughout the paper, this definition will guide the interpretation of our estimates.
In conceptual contrast to prior work (e.g., Sacerdote, 2005), we argue that one should not think of slavery’s average treatment effect merely as an effect *conditional on location*. Descending from an enslaved person made a person much more likely to come from (and still live in) environments that were relatively harmful to their economic progress. Their enslavement status directly caused the location of enslavement, and the treatment effect should include its impact. From an econometric perspective, geographic location can be interpreted as a *bad control* since it is a mediating variable through which slave status affects future descendants (Angrist and Pischke, 2008).
---
\(^{33}\) At time $t = 1$, the outcomes then become
$$y_{i,1} = (\lambda + \rho) \alpha_{i,0} + \rho \gamma_{\ell(i,0)}^0 + \gamma_{\ell(i,1)}^1 - s_i \rho \delta + \rho \varepsilon_{i,0} + \varepsilon_{i,1}, \tag{3}$$
|
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | where $\alpha_{i,1} = \lambda \alpha_{i,0}$ allows for transmission of ability over multiple generations. Thus, outcomes are determined by the ability of the initial generation through direct inheritance of ability ($\lambda$) and through intergenerational advantage derived from ability in previous generations ($\rho$). The current location ($\gamma_{\ell(i,1)}^1$) shifts the level of a person’s human capital. Through intergenerational transmission, human capital is also affected by (1) how previous generations were affected by where they lived ($\gamma_{\ell(i,0)}^0$), (2) whether their ancestors were enslaved until 1865 ($\delta$), and (3) their ancestors’ idiosyncratic human capital shocks ($\varepsilon_{i,0}$).
<page_number>18</page_number>
5 Socioeconomic Gaps between Descendants of Free and Enslaved Families
This section documents the gaps in education, income, and wealth from 1870 to 2000 between descendants of families enslaved until the Civil War and those freed earlier. We find that these gaps are large and persist until today.
5.1 Evolution of the Free-Enslaved Gap until 1940
We estimate the Free-Enslaved gap ($\beta_t$) in socioeconomic outcomes ($y_{i,t}$) separately for each decade $t$ from 1870 to 1940:
$$y_{i,t} = \alpha_t + \beta_t s_i + \phi_t' X_{i,t} + \varepsilon_{i,t}, \tag{5}$$
where $s_i$ is equal to one if person $i$ is classified as a descendant of the Enslaved and is zero otherwise. $X_{i,t}$ is a vector of controls that includes a quadratic term of age in our baseline specification. We cluster standard errors at the family level.\(^{34}\)
**FIGURE 3: Free-Enslaved Gap (1870–1940)**
(A) Literacy
(B) Occupational Skill
Notes: This figure shows the gaps in literacy and occupation skill (HISCLASS) among prime-age (20-54) male descendants of free vs. enslaved Black Americans in each census decade. We restrict the sample to observations linked to ancestors in 1850, 1860, 1870, or 1880. |
173,107 | 88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | BoustanRedding, LeahStephen | Althoff, Lukas | Economics Department | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023-07-06T20:24:49Z | 2023 | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01zs25xc72s | This dissertation studies inequality in the access to opportunity in America over the past 150 years, including the impact of pivotal policies and institutions.
In Chapter I, I study the long-run effects of anti-Black institutions—from slavery to Jim Crow—on Black Americans’ economic outcomes. I trace each family’s records from 1850 to 2000 to measure their exposure to those institutions. I show that Black families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than families whose ancestors were free earlier. The disparities between the two groups have persisted because most families whose ancestors were enslaved until the Civil War lived in states with strict Jim Crow regimes after slavery. Those Jim Crow regimes sharply reduced Black families’ economic progress, largely by limiting their access to education.
In Chapter II, I study the contribution of American women to social mobility. I first overcome the empirical challenge of linking women’s census and administrative records over their lifetimes despite name changes after marriage. To do so, I leverage information from administrative records containing millions of women’s maiden and married names. Using this new data, I document that a person’s socioeconomic status is better predicted by their mother’s status than their father’s, highlighting mothers’ critical role in shaping their children’s outcomes. In addition, women’s intergenerational mobility tended to be higher than men’s. I provide suggestive evidence that intergenerational mobility was especially high when and where marriages across different socioeconomic backgrounds were more common.
In Chapter III, I analyze the evolution of Black-white income gaps among women since 1950. I document that this gap narrowed substantially in the 1960s. At the same time, the Southern Black-white gap among women converged with that of other regions, ending the long period in which the South was the epicenter of racial inequality. Black women across the income distribution shared the improvements in the Black- white gap. However, only the best-earning Black women improved the rank they occupied in the national income distribution—Black women at lower parts of the distribution benefited from declines in national income inequality despite stagnating ranks. | en | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University | null | Race | Economics | The Modern and Historical Roots of Inequality | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) | null | 95 | We restrict the sample to observations linked to ancestors in 1850, 1860, 1870, or 1880. We control for a quadratic function in age and include 95 percent confidence bands clustered at the family level. See Data Appendix 1.3 for details on the sample and data.
\(^{34}\)We define a family as a group of individuals with a common 1870 ancestor.
<page_number>19</page_number>
We find that the socioeconomic differences between descendants of the Free and the Enslaved are large and persistent. In 1870, the formerly Enslaved were two times (over 40 percentage points) more likely to be illiterate than free Black Americans (see Figure 3). By 1940, the gap was 1.8 times (5 percentage points). Descendants of the Enslaved worked in less skill-intensive occupations than descendants of the Free from 1870 to 1940. Consistent with this skill gap, descendants of the Enslaved earn substantially lower incomes and are significantly less likely to own their homes.³⁵
The rich information on education, income, and wealth provided by the 1940 census allows us to get a detailed picture of the Free-Enslaved gap 75 years after slavery ended. Consistent with our previous results, we find that descendants of the Enslaved are substantially less educated, earn lower incomes, and have accumulated less wealth than descendants of free Black Americans (see Table 1). The gap in education amounts to 1.6 years—more than one-quarter of the average years of education among Black men in 1940.³⁶ The likelihood that a descendant of the Enslaved earned a high school or college degree was only half compared to descendants of the Free.³⁷ Consistent with the educational gap, the income and wealth of the Enslaved are substantially lower.³⁸
**TABLE 1: Free-Enslaved Gap (1940)**
| | Education (Years) | Wage Income (USD) | Homeownership (%) | House Value (USD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| | Mean: 5.99 | Mean: 381.20 | Mean: 29.25 | Mean: 1,371.95 |
| **Ancestor Enslaved** | **-1.59*** | **-145.92*** | **-7.24*** | **-694.69*** |
|
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