Discrimination, Migration, and Economic Outcomes: Evidence from World War I

Abstract

This paper examines the individual and aggregate costs of ethnic discrimination. Studying Germans in the U.S. during World War I, an event that abruptly downgraded their previously high social standing, we show that anti-German sentiment was strongly associated with counties' casualties in the war, leading to subsequent outmigration of Germans. Such relocation to evade discrimination was costly for German workers. However, counties with larger outflows of Germans, who tended to be well-trained manufacturing workers, incurred economic costs too, including a drop in average annual manufacturing wages of 0.6 to 2.2 percent. This effect lasted at least until 1930.

In or Out? Xenophobic Violence and Foreigner Integration. Evidence from 19th century France

“…Exit, however, can also correspond to leaving one's commune or county of residence. This is the type of exit that Ferrara and Fishback (2022) study, this is also the outcome we can analyze in this paper. A second possible choice is to assimilate.…”

“…A second possible choice is to assimilate. Assimilation can take different forms: adopting natives' cultural norms (Jaschke et al, 2022), changing one's name or one's children's names (Fouka, 2019;Saavedra, 2021), marrying a native (Gould and Klor, 2016), or naturalizing (Ferrara and Fishback, 2022;Fouka, 2019). The third option consists basically of keeping one's situation as it is.…”

Using Digitized Newspapers to Address Measurement Error in Historical Data

“…Thus, as described, our search not only considers pages in the county of interest but in all counties that are in the same state (e.g., Online Appendix Figure A.2). So, even if Autauga County in Alabama has no available newspaper pages for the search period but "Autauga County" 10 Chronicling America is another digital archive for historical newspapers that is commonly used by researchers (e.g., Wang 2019;Ferrara and Fishback 2023). However, it has fewer volumes than Newspapers.com and does not contain many digitized newspapers that cover our sample period.…”

“…28 Our approach is particularly suited for measures that can be easily generated or extracted using textual data. Simple n-gram or bag-ofwords approaches, as in Beach, Clay, and Saavedra (2022), Ferrara and Fishback (2023), Albright et al (2021), Beach and Hanlon (2023), Bazzi et al (2023), or Ottinger and Winkler (2022), are particularly promising. Anything that can be measured or extracted with a single search word or a combination of a few words lends itself to this approach and the generation of newspaper-based data.…”

“…We also contribute to a recent literature that uses digitized newspapers to generate novel data for research in economic history. This includes measures of media competition and partisan influence (Gentzkow, Shapiro, and Sinkinson 2014;Gentzkow et al 2015), racial and anti-group sentiment (Ferrara and Fishback 2023;Ottinger and Winkler 2022;Bazzi et al 2023), the spread of news relating to racial violence (Albright et al 2021;Calderon, Fouka, and Tabellini 2023), technology diffusion (Feigenbaum and Gross 2022), the 1918 influenza (Beach, Clay, and Saavedra 2022), fertility restrictions (Beach and Hanlon 2023), advertisements for the movie "Birth of a Nation" (Esposito et al 2023;Ang 2023), the price and types of available cotton seeds (Rhode 2021), among others.…”