Distinctively black names in the American past

Cook, Lisa D.; Logan, Trevon D.; Parman, John

doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2014.03.001

Cited by 43 publications

(40 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Our findings are related to a recent study by Cook, Logan, and Parman (2013), which documents racially distinctive names and points out that there is no evidence that blacks historically changed their names to overcome the probable economic disadvantage associated with distinctively black names. The high rate of passing we find suggests that an interesting avenue for future research is to explore whether individuals with distinctively black names changed their names and race such that matching methods that match on race cannot detect such name changes.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

“…given that the undercount of blacks in 1940 is approximately 8.4% and that passers constitute a relatively small proportion of blacks, the margin of error that is implied for our pass rates is not likely to be large. Cook, Logan, and Parman (2013) discusses this issue in their study of the racial concentration of names. They address it by comparing names and race in the Census to names and race in historical death registry data for Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina.…”

Section: Undercounting In the Historical Census Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

Nix¹,

Qian²

2015

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This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males "passed" for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later "reverse-passed" to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Undercounting In the Historical Census Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

Nix¹,

Qian²

2015

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“…Rubinstein and Brenner (2014) used sorting into inter-ethnic marriage and differences between Israeli ethnic surnames to study ethnic discrimination in labor markets. Both papers relate closely to the literature looking to racial discrimination and black names (see, for example, Fryer and Levitt (2004), Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) and Cook, Logan and Parman (2014), among others). 2 See also Olivetti and Paserman (2013) and Güell, Mora and Telmer (2015) for the use of informational contents of names to study intergenerational mobility.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Please call me John: name choice and the assimilation of immigrants in the United States, 1900-1930

Carneiro¹,

Lee²,

Reis³

2015

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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 June 2015Abstract The vast majority of immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century adopted first names that were common among natives. The rate of adoption of an American name increases with time in the US, although most immigrants adopt an American name within the first year of arrival. Choice of an American first name was associated with a more successful assimilation, as measured by job occupation scores, marriage to a US native and take-up of US citizenship. We examine economic determinants of name choice, by studying the relationship between changes in the proportion of immigrants with an American first name and changes in the concentration of immigrants as well as changes in local labor market conditions, across different census years. We find that high concentrations of immigrants of a given nationality in a particular location discouraged members of that nationality from taking American names. Poor local labor market conditions for immigrants (and good local labor market conditions for natives) led to more frequent name changes among immigrants.

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“…17 Given positive covariance between the unobservables in fathers' and sons' income, the true value of β must be lower than the OLS estimate.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850 –1940

Olivetti

Paserman

2015

American Economic Review

170

129

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This paper estimates historical intergenerational elasticities between fathers and children of both sexes in the United States using a novel empirical strategy. The key insight of our approach is that the information about socioeconomic status conveyed by first names can be used to create pseudo-links across generations. We find that both father-son and father-daughter elasticities were flat during the nineteenth century, increased sharply between 1900 and 1920, and declined slightly thereafter. We discuss the role of regional disparities in economic development, trends in inequality and returns to human capital, and the marriage market in explaining these patterns. (JEL D63, J12, J16, J24, J62, N31, N32)

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Distinctively black names in the American past

Cited by 43 publications

References 40 publications

The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

The Fluidity of Race: “Passing” in the United States, 1880-1940

Please call me John: name choice and the assimilation of immigrants in the United States, 1900-1930

In the Name of the Son (and the Daughter): Intergenerational Mobility in the United States, 1850 –1940

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