Internal Migration, Education and Upward Rank Mobility:Evidence from American History

Zachary Ward

No 4, CEH Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic History, Research School of Economics, Australian National University

Abstract: To what extent does internal migration lead to upward mobility? Using within-brother variation and a new linked dataset from 1910 to 1940, I estimate that internal migrants were more likely to improve on their father’s percentile rank than non-migrants. On average, the effect of migration was nearly four times the effect of one year of education; for those raised in poorer households, migration’s effect was about nine times that of education. The evidence suggests that internal migration was a key strategy for intergenerational progress in a context of rapid industrialization, high rates of rural-to-urban migration and large interregional income gaps.

Keywords: internal migration; intergenerational mobility; urbanization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J62 N31 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:auu:hpaper:076

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