The Geography of Opportunity after the Civil War: Black and White Americans' Intra- and Intergenerational Mobility into Property Ownership

William Collins and Nicholas C. Holtkamp

No 33860, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We shed new light on historical black-white disparities in wealth and economic mobility by examining datasets of linked census records. First, we compare black and white men’s intra- and inter-generational mobility into property ownership between 1870, the first census taken after the Civil War, and 1900. Conditional on not owning property in 1870, black men’s mobility rate into property ownership was far lower than white men’s. If black men’s post-1870 mobility had mirrored that of landless white men, the black-white home ownership gap in 1900 would have been small. Second, we show that for black men located in cotton-intensive counties in 1870, the likelihood of owning property in 1900 was far lower than for black men located elsewhere. This is apparent in national samples as well as in samples restricted to the states of the former Confederacy, with and without extensive controls. This pattern is connected to the prevalence of sharecropping and relatively high black population shares. For white men, the difference in upward mobility between cotton-intensive and other areas was much smaller or non-existent. Many black households did acquire land and homes of their own in this era, an important channel for economic advance, but racism and discrimination slowed their mobility into property ownership.

JEL-codes: I3 J70 N31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: DAE DEV LS
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33860.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:33860

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33860
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().