Abstract
Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility—family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital—can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.
Highlights
Intergenerational economic mobility is lower in the United States than in most other developed countries and has remained fairly constant over recent decades a Absolute upward mobility ( = 25)Absolute Upward Mobility% Slaves of 1860 Population c Relative mobilityP(Child in Q5 | Parent in Q1)T
This result should be interpreted carefully because of the challenges involved in identifying the precise underlying causal mechanisms and because multiple channels of transmission are likely at work, it is seemingly consistent with prior work emphasizing the adverse impact of slavery on the evolution of family structures in the American South after the Civil War and the historical continuity of family patterns (e.g., Gordon and McLanahan 1991; Miller forthcoming; Morgan et al 1993; Ruggles 1994)
I c is a mobility measure i for 1860 c is the percentage of the population enumerated as slaves in 1860, λs is a full set of state fixed effects, Xc is a vector of commuting zones (CZs)
Summary
I examine whether differences in intergenerational mobility across the United States reflect the historical distribution of slavery. Households headed by single mothers, are seemingly the most important of the five candidates in accounting for the fact that upward mobility is lower in areas with a higher prevalence of slavery This result should be interpreted carefully because of the challenges involved in identifying the precise underlying causal mechanisms and because multiple channels of transmission are likely at work, it is seemingly consistent with prior work emphasizing the adverse impact of slavery on the evolution of family structures in the American South after the Civil War and the historical continuity of family patterns (e.g., Gordon and McLanahan 1991; Miller forthcoming; Morgan et al 1993; Ruggles 1994).
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