Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data
利用1910至1930年关联人口普查数据，研究非裔美国人从美国南部向北迁移的选择性、迁移者的经济收益以及迁移对缩小种族经济差距的作用。
The onset of World War I spurred the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migration? How large were the migrants’ gains? Did migration narrow the racial gap in economic status? We find evidence of positive selection, but the migrants’ gains were large. A substantial amount of black-white convergence in this period is attributable to migration.