Urbanization in the United States, 1800-2000

Abstract

Forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of American Economic History, edited by ed. Louis Cain, Price Fishback and Paul Rhode. We thank Robert Margo and Evan Roberts for useful conversations about data collection and Walker Hanlon for comments on the draft. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Urbanization and mortality decline

“…This argument goes all the way back to Friedrich Engels ( [1845])’s emphasis on the role of manufacturing in pulling rural migrants into cities and more recently formed the basis for Todaro ()’s noted model, whereby rural inhabitants migrated to urban areas despite notable levels of urban unemployment due to expected future wages (see Kelley & Williamson, , for an overview). For much of the 20th century, the wage gap/structural transformation argument was seen as convincing (Brueckner, ) and still appears to be convincing in explaining urbanization in Europe and North America (Boustan, Bunten, & Hearey, ; Michaels, Rauch, & Redding, ; Nunn & Qian, ; Voigtländer & Voth, ). Similarly, some cross‐national analyses have used pooled‐OLS to find a robust relationship between GDP/capita, the sectoral composition of GDP and/or the labor force, and levels of urbanization (Davis & Henderson, ; Moomaw & Shatter, ).…”

Legislators' Response to Changes in the Electorate: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

“…Moreover, especially in the North, gerrymandering was substantially less common than it is today (Snyder and Ansolabehere, 2008). Between 1900 and 1964, despite major demographic shifts induced by international and internal migration (Boustan et al, 2013), redistricting across non-southern districts was typically non-strategic (Engstrom, 2013). If anything, the lack of systematic redistricting rules likely introduced a pro-rural bias: more densely populated areas (i.e.…”

To the New World and Back Again: Return Migrants in the Age of Mass Migration

“…Column 2 shows that the value of time spent in the US was higher for men who worked in a non-agricultural occupation while abroad, likely in an urban area (5 percent), relative to men who worked in farming (1 percent). In the late nineteenth century, the urban wage premium was 30-40 percent in the US (Boustan, Bunten and Hearey, 2013); higher pay in urban areas would have allowed return migrants to accumulate savings more quickly. Given that many return migrants worked in agriculture upon return (as we describe below), this pattern is not consistent with the idea of acquiring transferrable skills in the destination country, but more so with acquiring savings to invest at home.…”