Essays on Intergenerational Mobility and Inequality in Economic History

Abstract

This dissertation explores intergenerational mobility and inequality in the early twentieth century. The first chapter asks whether economic downturns increase or decrease mobility. I estimate the effect of the Great Depression on mobility, linking a sample of fathers before the Depression to their sons in 1940. I find that the Great Depression lowered intergenerational mobility for sons growing up in cities hit by large downturns. The effects are driven by differential, selective migration: the sons of richer fathers are able to move to better destinations. The second chapter compares historic rates of intergenerational mobility to today. Based on a sample matched from the Iowa 1915 State Census to the 1940 Federal Census, I argue that there was more mobility in the early twentieth century than is found in contemporary data, whether measured using intergenerational elasticities, rank-rank correlations, educational persistence, or occupational status measures. In the third chapter, I detail the machine learning method used to create the linked census samples used in chapters 1 and 2. I use a supervised learning approach to record linkage, training a matching algorithm on hand-linked historical data which is able to efficiently and accurately find links in noisy in historical data.