Have the Poor Always Been Less Likely to Migrate? Evidence From Inheritance Practices During the Age of Mass Migration

Abstract

Using novel data on 50,000 Norwegian men, we study the effect of wealth on the probability of internal or international migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), a time when the US maintained an open border to European immigrants. We do so by exploiting variation in parental wealth and in expected inheritance by birth order, gender composition of siblings, and region. We find that wealth discouraged migration in this era, suggesting that the poor could be more likely to move if migration restrictions were lifted today. We discuss the implications of these historical findings to developing countries.

Intergenerational Mobility in Norway, 1865–2011

“…7 In this study of Norway, however, the difference in intergenerational mobility between regions is found to be only moderate, though one can observe a correlation between economic and occupational mobility. 8 This is in line with the studies by Abramitzky et al (2012Abramitzky et al ( , 2013, who find evidence of negative selection of transatlantic migrants from late nineteenthcentury Norway, suggesting that migration was a way of moving out of adverse economic conditions at home. The present study does not find any signs that differential development of the country's regions contributed significantly to the increase in intergenerational mobility.…”

“…Data from historical Norwegian censuses (for 1865 and 1900) has found some use in economic research, the most prominent examples being the studies of Abramitzky et al (2012Abramitzky et al ( , 2013 on Norway-US migration. The individual records from the 1910 census were released in 2010, but they were only recently (2014) made available with occupation codes and have not yet been widely used in research.…”

Wealth Heterogeneity and the Income Elasticity of Migration

“…At the micro level, my approach to disentangling liquidity and opportunity cost effects of rising income generalizes a strategy developed in Abramitzky et al (2013). Using data from 19th century Norway and the United States, they exploit parental assets as a source of interhousehold variation in liquidity constraints for children who then face different opportunity costs based on intrahousehold variation in inheritance of those assets.…”

Multiple Measures of Historical Intergenerational Mobility: Iowa 1915 to 1940

“… For research on economic outcomes in periods without earnings data, many economists have turned to such occupation score measures, including Abramitzky et al . (, ) and Olivetti and Paserman (). I estimate mobility rates based on occupation scores during the Great Depression and find that, like earnings‐based measures, occupational mobility was reduced for sons growing up in cities with more severe depression downturns (Feigenbaum, ). …”