Does It Matter Where You Came From? Ancestry Composition and Economic Performance of U.S. Counties, 1850-2010

Scott Fulford, Ivan Petkov and Fabio Schiantarelli

No 9060, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The United States provides a unique laboratory for understanding how the cultural, institutional, and human capital endowments of immigrant groups shape economic outcomes. In this paper, we use census micro-sample information to reconstruct the country-of-ancestry distribution for US counties from 1850 to 2010. We also develop a county-level measure of GDP per capita over the same period. Using this novel panel data set, we investigate whether changes in the ancestry composition of a county matter for local economic development and the channels through which the cultural, institutional, and educational legacy of the country of origin affects economic outcomes in the US. Our results show that the evolution of the country-of-origin composition of a county matters. Moreover, the culture, institutions, and human capital that the immigrant groups brought with them and pass on to their children are positively associated with local development in the US. Among these factors, measures of culture that capture attitudes towards cooperation play the most important and robust role. Finally, our results suggest that while fractionalization of ancestry groups is positively related with county GDP, fractionalization in attributes such as trust, is negatively related to local economic performance.

Keywords: immigration; ethnicity; ancestry; economic development; culture; institutions; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J15 N31 N32 O10 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 83 pages
Date: 2015-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-evo, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-lab, nep-mig, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9060.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Does it matter where you came from? Ancestry composition and economic performance of US counties, 1850–2010 (2020)
Working Paper: Does It Matter Where You Came From? Ancestry Composition and Economic Performance of U.S. Counties, 1850-2010 (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9060

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().