Suchergebnisse

As over 30 million people moved to North America during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), governments feared that Europe was being depleted of its most talented workers. I use new longitudinal data from the early twentieth century to study the geography and selectivity of migration from Ireland, the European country with the highest emigration rate. I find that Irish-speakers and the sons of farmers in poorer communities, where emigrant networks were strongest, were more likely to move to the United States. These results indicate that highly skilled workers were, in fact, underrepresented in the flow to America.

Abstract
We document that children growing up in places left behind by today's economy experience lower levels of social mobility as adults. Using a longitudinal database that tracks over 20,000 places in the USA from 1980 to 2018, we identify two kinds of left behind places: the 'long-term left behind' that have struggled over long periods of history; and 'recently left-behind' places where conditions have deteriorated. Compared to children of similar baseline household income levels, we find that exposure to left behind places is associated with a 4-percentile reduction in adult income rank. Children fare considerably better when exposed to places where conditions are improving. These outcomes vary across prominent social and spatial categories and are compounded when nearby places are also experiencing hardship. Based on these findings, we argue that left behind places are having 'scarring effects' on children that could manifest long into the future, exacerbating the intergenerational challenges faced by low-income households and communities. Improvements in local economic conditions and outmigration to more prosperous places are, therefore, unlikely to be full remedies for the problems created by left behind places.