Citation

Berger T. Demography 2018; 55(4): 1547-1565.

Affiliation

Department of Economic History & Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, Scheelevägen 15B, 223 63, Lund, Sweden. thor.berger@ekh.lu.se.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Population Association of America, Publisher Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s13524-018-0693-4

PMID

29971701

Abstract

Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility-family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital-can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.

Language: en

Keywords

Intergenerational mobility; Persistence; Slavery