Can You Move to Opportunity? Evidence from the Great Migration

Abstract

This paper shows that racial composition shocks during the Great Migration (1940–1970) reduced the gains from growing up in the northern United States for Black families and can explain 27 percent of the region’s racial upward mobility gap today. I identify northern Black share increases by interacting pre-1940 Black migrants’ location choices with predicted southern county out-migration. Locational changes, not negative selection of families, explain lower upward mobility, with persistent segregation and increased crime and policing as plausible mechanisms. The case of the Great Migration provides a more nuanced view of moving to opportunity when destination reactions are taken into account. (JEL H75, H76, J15, J62, K42, N32, R23)

African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880

“…First, a burgeoning literature studies the transmission of labor market outcomes across generations 3 (e.g., Tomes 1979, 1986;Solon 1992Solon , 1999Mazumder 2005;Black and Devereux 2011;Long and Ferrie 2013;Chetty et al 2014;Olivetti and Paserman 2015). Within the intergenerational mobility literature, several studies investigate racial differences in intergenerational income mobility in recent decades (Hertz 2005, Isaacs 2008, Bhattacharya and Mazumder 2011, Mazumder 2014, Derenoncourt 2019, Chetty et al 2020. Typically, they find substantial racial differences in mobility out of the lower end of the income distribution and in maintaining positions higher in the distribution.…”

The geography of intergenerational mobility — Danish evidence

“…This is driven by Western Jutland high In future work our estimates can be used to analyse causal drivers of intergenerational mo-bility. Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa (2017) and Derenoncourt (2019) provide recent examples of how this can be done with US estimates. We make our estimates available in an online data appendix for related future research.…”

“…1 Chetty et al (20141 Chetty et al ( , 2019 provide estimates from US counties and census tracts, and Connolly et al (2019) for Canadian census tracts. 2 The mobility estimates from these descriptive studies have been used for example by Derenoncourt (2019) and Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa (2017) to estimate the causal e ect of violent crime and the Great Migration on intergenerational mobility in the United States.…”

Policing, Property, and the Production of Racial Segregation

“…This drove a significant share of the growth of racial disparities in incarceration in the North. Extending Muller's analysis to 1970, Derenoncourt (2022) shows that municipalities across the North responded to Black mobility by increasing spending on policing and growing incarceration rates. These findings frame the growth of policing and punishment in the North not just as a general process of mass incarceration but as specifically responsive to Black migration.…”