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Leah Boustan Publications

University of Chicago Press
Abstract

This volume refines and extends the economic history literature on economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality manifests itself on various dimensions, including access to resources and to economic security, as well as access to education and opportunities for migration, marriage and other important life decisions. Measuring inequality and studying its variation over time and in response to economic shocks such as recessions and wars deepen our understanding of how the economy operates and can inform the design of public policies. The studies in this compendium present comprehensive evidence on income distribution during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on new data on wages and prices. They also consider disparities in economic well-being that are reflected in outcomes other than wage and salary income, such as homeownership and marriage. The volume also presents new evidence on the effects of income inequality on social outcomes. It concludes with an intellectual history of “human capital,” a core concept in the economic analysis of the underpinnings of labor market inequality.

Working Paper
Abstract

This chapter surveys new data sources employed in urban and regional economics in the past decade and the insights they have enabled. We first provide a primer on the data sources, including advantages, disadvantages and use cases. Historical data sources include linked census records as well as digitized maps and directories. Contemporary data come from satellites, mobile phones, social media and wikis, posted prices and listings, e-commerce and payment card transactions, newly available administrative sources, and text, among others. We then discuss the advances these data have enabled in substantive areas throughout urban and regional economics, with historical and contemporary examples in each area. We conclude with some predictions and warnings.

Working Paper
Abstract

We estimate intergenerational mobility of immigrants and their children in fifteen receiving countries. We document large income gaps for first-generation immigrants that diminish in the second generation. Around half of the second-generation gap can be explained by differences in parental income, with the remainder due to differential rates of absolute mobility. The daughters of immigrants enjoy higher absolute mobility than daughters of locals in most destinations, while immigrant sons primarily enjoy this advantage in countries with long histories of immigration. Cross-country differences in absolute mobility are not driven by parental country-of-origin, but instead by destination labor markets and immigration policy.

Working Paper
Abstract

This paper provides an overview of recent empirical and methodological advances in the study of historical intergenerational mobility trends, with a focus on key measurement challenges. These advances are made possible by the recent digitization of historical censuses and new methods of historical record-linking, which have enabled researchers to create large historical samples of parent-child links. We identify three main findings. First, absolute mobility increased in the decades leading up to 1940 but has since declined, both in the US and other industrial countries. Second, recent studies on relative mobility question the classic narrative that the US has transitioned from a “land of opportunity” in the 19th century to a less mobile society today, suggesting that mobility was not as high in the past. However, estimates of relative mobility are sensitive to choices regarding sample selection and measurement. Third, we explore mechanisms underlying shifts in intergenerational mobility over time, including geographic mobility, wealth shocks, educational attainment, locational effects, and the transmission of parent-specific human capital. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research

Working Paper
Abstract

Immigrant enclaves offer valuable ethnic amenities but may delay assimilation. We study enclave formation in the Age of Mass Migration by using the centralized location decisions for “ethnic” Catholic churches. After a church opening, same-ethnicity residents of chosen neighborhoods experienced falling earnings but strengthened communal ties, as compared to residents of areas matched on baseline characteristics. Treated residents held more manual occupations, and increased in-group marriage and naming. These effects persist into the second generation and are not observed for non-ethnic neighbors. Consistent with the historical record, Poles organized communal life around neighborhood parishes, but Italians were less church-centered.

American Economic Review: Insights
Abstract

We provide the first nationally representative long-run series (1870–2020) of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born. As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated (30 percent relative to US-born Whites). This relative decline occurred among immigrants from all regions and cannot be explained by changes in observable characteristics or immigration policy. Instead, the decline is part of a broader divergence of outcomes between less-educated immigrants and their US-born counterparts.

PNAS Nexus
Abstract

We contribute to the public debate on immigration policy in the United States by providing a long-term, empirical perspective. We develop a novel method of linking individuals across historical Census waves to trace the lives of millions of immigrants in the past and compare their outcomes with immigrants today. We document that upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century, and that children of immigrant parents catch up to and frequently exceed the economic outcomes of the children of US-born parents. By our measures, immigrants as a group are no more likely to be incarcerated than those born in the United States, and they assimilate into American culture today at rates comparable to historical standards. Attitudes toward immigrants today are more positive than a century ago, albeit more polarized by political party.

Journal of Economic History
Abstract

The Industrial Removal Office funded 39,000 Jewish households to leave enclave neighborhoods in New York City from 1900 to 1922. Compared to neighbors with the same baseline occupation, program participants earned 4 percent more ten years after relocation. These gains persisted to the next generation. Benefits increased with more years spent outside of an enclave. Participants were more likely to speak English, and married spouses with less Jewish names. More Jewishly-identified men (as measured by own names) were more likely to return to the city. We contextualize these results with new national evidence on Jewish economic and cultural assimilation.

Journal of Urban Economics
Abstract

As we sat down for our annual Journal of Urban Economics editorial meeting in the summer of 2020, the country was being rocked by a wave of large-scale urban protests condemning police violence against Black Americans. This round of protest, sparked by the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, led to immediate calls for police reform – including some far-reaching appeals to “defund the police.” The national climate encouraged a sharpened focus in academia on systemic or structural discrimination, with work on this topic – long having been studied by minority scholars – attracting more widespread attention from both researchers and policymakers.

As an editorial team, we frankly felt it was somewhat out of touch of us to be discussing submission rates, decision times, etc., of the leading journal in urban economics while America's cities were erupting with protests and calls for policy reforms. Urban economists have important perspectives to add to the national conversation and we, as editors, could do more to encourage research in these areas.

Journal of Urban Economics
Abstract

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status suburban Californian school districts from 2000–2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in these higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Abstract

We classify and analyze 200,000 US congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration from 1880 to the present. Despite the salience of antiimmigration rhetoric today, we find that political speech about immigration is now much more positive on average than in the past, with the shift largely taking place between World War II and the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965. However, since the late 1970s, political parties have become increasingly polarized in their expressed attitudes toward immigration, such that Republican speeches today are as negative as the average congressional speech was in the 1920s, an era of strict immigration quotas. Using an approach based on contextual embeddings of text, we find that modern Republicans are significantly more likely to use language that is suggestive of metaphors long associated with immigration, such as “animals” and “cargo,” and make greater use of frames like “crime” and “legality.” The tone of speeches also differs strongly based on which nationalities are mentioned, with a striking similarity between how Mexican immigrants are framed today and how Chinese immigrants were framed during the era of Chinese exclusion in the late 19th century. Overall, despite more favorable attitudes toward immigrants and the formal elimination of race-based restrictions, nationality is still a major factor in how immigrants are spoken of in Congress.

PublicAffairs
Abstract

The facts, not the fiction, of America’s immigration experience

Immigration is one of the most fraught, and possibly most misunderstood, topics in American social discourse—yet, in most cases, the things we believe about immigration are based largely on myth, not facts. Using the tools of modern data analysis and ten years of pioneering research, new evidence is provided about the past and present of the American Dream, debunking myths fostered by political opportunism and sentimentalized in family histories, and draw counterintuitive conclusions, including: 

  • Upward Mobility: Children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially those of poor immigrants, do better economically than children of U.S.-born residents – a pattern that has held for more than a century.
  • Rapid Assimilation: Immigrants accused of lack of assimilation (such as Mexicans today and the Irish in the past) actually assimilate fastest.
  • Improved Economy: Immigration changes the economy in unexpected positive ways and staves off the economic decline that is the consequence of an aging population.
  • Helps U.S. Born: Closing the door to immigrants harms the economic prospects of the U.S.-born—the people politicians are trying to protect.

 Using powerful story-telling and unprecedented research employing big data and algorithms, Abramitzky and Boustan are like dedicated family genealogists but millions of times over. They provide a new take on American history with surprising results, especially how comparable the “golden era” of immigration is to today, and why many current policy proposals are so misguided.

American Economic Review
Abstract

The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, relative to Southern households that had been equally wealthy before the war. Yet, their sons almost entirely recovered from this wealth shock by 1900, and their grandsons completely converged by 1940. Marriage networks and connections to other elite families may have aided in recovery, whereas transmission of entrepreneurship and skills appear less central.

Journal of Economic Literature
Abstract

The recent digitization of complete count census data is an extraordinary opportunity for social scientists to create large longitudinal datasets by linking individuals from one census to another or from other sources to the census. We evaluate different automated methods for record linkage, performing a series of comparisons across methods and against hand linking. We have three main findings that lead us to conclude that automated methods perform well. First, a number of automated methods generate very low (less than 5 percent) false positive rates. The automated methods trace out a frontier illustrating the trade-off between the false positive rate and the (true) match rate. Relative to more conservative automated algorithms, humans tend to link more observations but at a cost of higher rates of false positives. Second, when human linkers and algorithms use the same linking variables, there is relatively little disagreement between them. Third, across a number of plausible analyses, coefficient estimates and parameters of interest are very similar when using linked samples based on each of the different automated methods. We provide code and Stata commands to implement the various automated methods.

American Economic Review
Abstract

Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants' advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. Immigrants achieve this advantage in part by choosing to settle in locations that offer better prospects for their children.