TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2018//
TI  - Places of persistence: slavery and the geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States
JO  - Demography
A1  - Berger, Thor
SP  - 1547
EP  - 1565
VL  - 55
IS  - 4
N2  - Intergenerational mobility has remained stable over recent decades in the United States but varies sharply across the country. In this article, I document that areas with more prevalent slavery by the outbreak of the Civil War exhibit substantially less upward mobility today. I find a negative link between prior slavery and contemporary mobility within states, when controlling for a wide range of historical and contemporary factors including income and inequality, focusing on the historical slave states, using a variety of mobility measures, and when exploiting geographical differences in the suitability for cultivating cotton as an instrument for the prevalence of slavery. As a first step to disentangle the underlying channels of persistence, I examine whether any of the five broad factors highlighted by Chetty et al. (2014a) as the most important correlates of upward mobility-family structure, income inequality, school quality, segregation, and social capital-can account for the link between earlier slavery and current mobility. More fragile family structures in areas where slavery was more prevalent, as reflected in lower marriage rates and a larger share of children living in single-parent households, is seemingly the most relevant to understand why it still shapes the geography of opportunity in the United States.<p />  <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 0070-3370
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0693-4
ID  - ref1
ER  -