The Other Great Migration: Southern Whites and the New Right

Bazzi, Samuel; Ferrara, Andreas; Fiszbein, Martín; Pearson, Thomas W.; Testa, Patrick A.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3968729

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Our work nonetheless advances a burgeoning body of research that connects variability in the natural environment to religious participation and belief (Ager, Hansen, and Lonstrup 2016;Ager and Ciccone 2018;Bentzen 2019) and other sociocultural attributes (Raz 2021;Fiszbein, Jung, and Vollrath 2022). In the U.S. setting, these findings add to a literature on the historical roots of American culture and identity (Bazzi, Fiszbein, and Gebresilasse 2020;Fouka, Mazumder, and Tabellini 2022), including the unique religiosity that characterizes the South (Dochuk 2012(Dochuk , 2019, as well as the origins and persistence of its geocultural divides (Bazzi et al 2023;Desmet and Wacziarg 2021).…”

mentioning

confidence: 57%

“…Given the importance of natural resources for economies around the globe, combined with the vast variation in religious engagement across space, it is tempting to also indulge in speculation as to the external validity of our findings in other settings and natural resources. Indeed, America’s other oil epicenter, Southern California, also happens to be the birthplace of the national evangelical movement, which grew out of enclaves made up of Baptists and Pentecostals of Texas and Oklahoma origin (Bazzi et al 2023). Dochuk (2012) draws other parallels abroad, noting how a “nexus of God and oil” can similarly be found in the Canadian West, the Middle East, and parts of South America.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Churches as Social Insurance: Oil Risk and Religion in the U.S. South

Ferrara,

Testa

2023

J. Econ. Hist.

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Religious communities are important providers of social insurance. We show that risk associated with oil dependence facilitated the proliferation of religious communities throughout the U.S. South during the twentieth century. Known oil abundance predicts higher rates of church membership, which are not driven by selective migration or local economic development. Consistent with a social insurance channel, greater oil price volatility increases effects, while greater access to credit, state-level social insurance, and private insurance crowd out effects. Religious communities limit spillovers of oil price shocks across sectors, reducing increases in unemployment following a negative shock by about 30 percent.

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confidence: 57%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Churches as Social Insurance: Oil Risk and Religion in the U.S. South

Ferrara,

Testa

2023

J. Econ. Hist.

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“…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.…”

Section: Potential Gains Future Applications and Drawbacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Digitized Newspapers to Address Measurement Error in Historical Data

Ferrara,

Ha,

Walsh

2024

J. Econ. Hist.

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This paper shows how to remove attenuation bias in regression analyses due to measurement error in historical data for a given variable of interest by using a secondary measure that can be easily generated from digitized newspapers. We provide three methods for using this secondary variable to deal with non-classical measurement error in a binary treatment: set identification, bias reduction via sample restriction, and a parametric bias correction. We demonstrate the usefulness of our methods by replicating four recent economic history papers. Relative to the initial analyses, our results yield markedly larger coefficient estimates.

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“…8 Bazzi et al (2023) document that the migration of southern racially conservative whites caused the political and ideological realignment of the U.S. North.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%