Collaborative Research: Economic Outcomes and Self-Selection in the Age of Mass Migration: A Micro Approach

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This project will create and analyze a novel data set following individuals who moved to the United States and their siblings who stayed in Europe during the period of mass migration in late nineteenth century. This analysis of individual migration behavior contributes to the economic history of the US and European sending countries and answers important questions in the economics of immigration. The PIs make use of newly-digitized Censuses from two sending countries--Norway and Great Britain--as well as 100% samples of Norwegian and British migrants compiled from US Census records available on the genealogy website Ancestry.com. The PIs ask whether and to what extent migrants were positively/negatively selected from their sending populations, how to estimate the returns to migration while taking into account this selection, and how migrants and children of migrants performed in the US relative to the native-born. The fact that migrants may not have been randomly selected from the sending population complicates the estimation of the "true" returns to migration. The first project develops a method to estimate returns to migration and infer the direction of migrant selection. The identification strategy relies on comparisons between migrants and their siblings who stayed in Europe, as well as the primogeniture laws in Europe that exogenously increased the propensity of younger brothers to migrate. The fact that migrants may be positively (or negatively) selected from the sending population does not automatically imply that they will be more (or less) skilled than the average worker in the destination. The second project follows the career of European migrants from 20 sending countries and their children in the US. The PIs compare the labor market outcomes of cohorts of first and second generation immigrants with the outcomes of the native-born from 1900-1930. If migrants' earnings eventually overtake those of US natives, one can infer that migrants were positively selected relative to the US population. Broader Impact: The sustained rate of high in-migration to the US during this period was historically unprecedented at the time and has yet to be surpassed. Understanding this large migrant flow has important implications for both US and European economic history. In particular, the US growth take-off in the late nineteenth century may have been reinforced by the human capital of positively selected migrants (or, alternatively, was all the more impressive for taking place while the country absorbed a negatively selected migrant flow). This project will also facilitate comparisons between historical and contemporary immigrant flows. Immigration was subject to few policy restrictions in the late nineteenth century. While current migration patterns in part reflect policy preferences for skilled workers or family reunification, historical migration trends were driven by individual migration decisions alone. The project will inform policy by shedding light on what types of migrant selection could be expected in the absence of restrictive border policy. Finally, a key goal of the effort to create a large linked data set of migrants and their non-migrant siblings is to make these important data publicly available for the benefit of the larger research community. These data are likely to be widely used by scholars to address various questions in labor economics, macroeconomics and economic history.