Fields: Migration; Labor economics; Economic history; Economic geography

Working Papers:

Immigration and Economic Opportunity (Job Market Paper) [SSRN]

How children of U.S.-born adapt to immigration-induced local changes is empirically ambiguous and understudied. Uncovering the impact of exposure to immigrants during childhood helps us understand the dynamic responses to immigration and the implications for intergenerational mobility. To study the impact, I link children of U.S.-born in each of the 1900 to 1920 U.S. censuses to their adulthood years in the following censuses until 1940. I instrument immigration’s destination choice by exploiting the disparities of preexisting immigration settlement patterns and the variation in their arrivals from 1900 to 1920. I find that immigration induces children of U.S.-born to accumulate more human capital. However, children of higher-skilled fathers adapt better and benefit more than their peers. The findings indicate that though immigration induces skill upgrading, it increases U.S.-born cross-generation skill persistence. The incentive to specialize may explain the skill upgrading; exposure to immigrants during childhood encourages children of U.S.-born to specialize in less immigrant-intensive and higher-skilled occupations. Mobility expands specialization opportunities; immigration-induced rural-to-urban migration makes higher-skilled jobs more accessible for the U.S.-born.

The Returns of HBCUs to Black Americans: Evidence for the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries with Jorge De la Roca

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have been an important platform for African-American children to access higher education. This paper examines the effect of HBCU openings on local economic outcomes between 1870 and 1940 using the full-count censuses. While around 60% of the openings were between 1870 and 1910, we focus on the timing of the first opening in a county and adapt the staggered difference-in-difference strategy to estimate the effect of HBCU establishment. We estimate the impact while doubly robust conditioning on several county characteristics to address the endogenous concern of opening locations. We show that HBCU openings increase local Black’s mean occupational scores and encourage Black workers to switch jobs from the agricultural sector to higher-skilled manufacturing and non-manual occupations. The results are not driven by in-migrants whom the new establishment attracted.

The Great Migration's Impact on Southern Inequality with Jack Chapel

This paper studies the Great Migration—the early 20th-century mass migration of Black Americans out of the U.S. South—and its impact on Southern local labor markets. To isolate the impacts of migration from potentially correlated economic impacts of local push factors, we construct a shift-share style “demand-pull” instrument, exploiting variation in preexisting Southern out-migration patterns in 1900-10 and labor demand changes in the North in 1910–1940. We estimate that counties with one percentile higher out-of-South migration during 1910–1940 had $0.03 (0.5%) higher average Black weekly wages in 1940. We find no effects on White wages, resulting in a reduction in the racial wage gap. Reduced Black labor supply and improved human capital accumulation are investigated as potential mechanisms. The results provide novel evidence of how the Great Migration impacted the Southern communities migrants left.

Work in Progress:

Immigration and Internal Migration with Jack Chapel and Daniel Angel Quintana

Compete Opportunities: New Waves and Early Arrivals Immigrants