American education in the age of mass migrations 1870–1930

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in American Education in the Age of Mass Migrations 1870-1930Fabrice Murtin Martina Viarengo The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. , which take into account the impact of mass migrations on the US educational level. We reconstruct the foreign-born US population by age and by country of origin, while combining data on the flow of migrants by country and the age pyramids of migrants by country. Then we use original data on educational attainment in the nineteenth century presented in Morrisson and Murtin (2008) in order to estimate the educational level of US immigrants by age and by country. As a result, our series are consistent with the first national estimates of average schooling in 1940. We show that mass migrations have had a significant but modest impact on the US average educational attainment. However, the educational gap between US natives and immigrants was large and increased with the second immigration wave, a phenomenon that most likely fostered the implementation of restrictive immigration rules in the 1920s.JEL Classification: I2, J24, N70, O1

The Kuznets curve of human capital inequality: 1870–2010

“…First, we have improved the education database published by Morrisson and Murtin [19]. 2 We took into account differential mortality across educational groups to correct the distributions of schooling after 1960, and we refined the US series by taking into account immigration in this country over the 19th and early 20th centuries, while drawing from Murtin and Viarengo [21].…”

The Democratic Transition

“…The evidence in favor of such effects is mixed. For instance, Barro (1997) found a nonlinear effect of democracy on growth, with an initial increase in 1 See Lindert (2004), Murtin and Viarengo (2010), and Morrisson and Murtin (2009). 2 Democracy in America, Volume 1, chapter 9, "The main causes that tend to maintain a democratic republic in the United States".…”

The democratic transition

“…The evidence in favor of such effects is mixed. For instance, Barro (1997) found a nonlinear effect of democracy on growth, with an initial increase in growth and a negative relation once a given level of democracy has been 1 See Lindert (2004), Murtin and Viarengo (2010), and Morrisson and Murtin (2009). 2 Democracy in America, Volume 1, chapter 9, "the main causes that tend to maintain a democratic republic in the United States".…”