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Migration and Economic Mobility: Wealth Accumulation and Occupational Change Among Antebellum Migrants and Persisters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Steven Herscovici
Steven Herscovici
Affiliation:
Analysis Group/Economics, One Brattle Square, Fifth Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138. Phone (617)349-2102; (617)864-3742.
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Abstract

Research on nineteenth-century economic and social mobility has concentrated on occupational change among men who remained in the same community for ten or more years, although fewer than half of any community's residents persist that long. This article uses a data set created specifically to compare the experiences of men who migrated from Newburyport, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century with those of men who persisted. It finds that blue-collar migrants were more successful than were their counterparts who did not move. The results suggest that previous studies may have considerably underestimated the extent of economic opportunity in nineteenth-century America.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , December 1998 , pp. 927 - 956
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1998

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