EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Immigrants and the Making of America

Sandra Sequeira, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian

The Review of Economic Studies, 2020, vol. 87, issue 1, 382-419

Abstract: We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment today. The long-run effects seem to capture the persistence of short-run benefits, including greater industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation.

Keywords: Immigration; Historical persistence; Economic development; B52; F22; N72; O10; O40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (84)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdz003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Immigrants and the making of America (2020) Downloads
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:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:1:p:382-419.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:87:y:2020:i:1:p:382-419.