Forbidden love: The impact of banning interracial marriages

Roberta Ziparo

French Stata Users' Group Meetings 2023 from Stata Users Group

Abstract: The majority of U.S. states enacted antimiscegenation laws at varying points during the 19th and 20th centuries. These laws made interracial marriages “prohibited and void”, making them a cornerstone policy of segregation. Exploiting variations in introduction and coverage, I study how these laws shaped family structures and reinforced differences in economic outcomes across racial groups. To do this, I combined information on state-level antimiscegenation laws with longitudinal data from U.S. censuses (1850–1940). This dataset allows me to follow more than 30 million men over time. My preliminary results suggest that the implementation of antimiscegenation laws changed the composition of marriages and increased out-of-state migration of individuals targeted by the laws, in particular, individuals in mixed marriages but also black men overall. Moreover, codifying race was a key necessity to enforce interracial marriage bans so that miscegenation laws included the blood purity rules. In line with this, I find that racial identity changes of initially black individuals, a nonnegligible phenomenon, declined when miscegenation laws were introduced. The laws also had an impact on keeping an exploitative agricultural economic model in place.

Date: 2023-08-11
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:boc:fsug23:31

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in French Stata Users' Group Meetings 2023 from Stata Users Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F Baum ().