The American Frontier: Technology versus Immigration

Guillaume Vandenbroucke

Review of Economic Dynamics, 2008, vol. 11, issue 2, 283-301

Abstract: How important was international immigration for the U.S. and its demography during the nineteenth century? This paper investigates, quantitatively, its effect on the westward movement of population and the regional and secular changes in fertility. Beside immigration, two alternative forces are considered: technological progress and the land policy (the Homestead Act). An optimal growth model with endogenous fertility and migration is calibrated, and counterfactual experiments reveal that the main driving forces were productivity growth and the declining cost of transportation. International immigration played a lesser role. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Keywords: Population growth; Migration; Fertility; Technological progress; US westward expansion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E1 J1 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.red.2007.07.001
Access to full texts is restricted to ScienceDirect subscribers and institutional members. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/ for details.

Related works:
Working Paper: The American Frontier: Technology versus Immigration (2004)
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:red:issued:06-113

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.economic ... ription-information/

DOI: 10.1016/j.red.2007.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economic Dynamics is currently edited by Loukas Karabarbounis

More articles in Review of Economic Dynamics from Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().