Places of Persistence: Slavery and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in the United States.

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...

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Publicado en:Demography (Springer Nature) Vol. 55; no. 4; pp. 1547 - 1566
Autor principal: Berger, Thor
Formato: journal article
Publicado: Springer Nature Aug2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        au: Berger, Thor
        affil: Department of Economic History & Centre for Economic Demography, Lund University, Scheelevägen 15B, 223 63, Lund, Sweden
      su:
        United States
        Intergenerational mobility
        Slavery
        Geography
        Economic mobility
        Income
        Equality
      sug:
        subj:
          Intergenerational mobility
          Slavery
          Geography
          Economic mobility
          Income
          Equality
          United States
      keyword:
        Persistence
        Persistence
      ab: 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.
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    language: English
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