In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

The 1930's American Dust Bowl created archetypal "Dust Bowl migrants," refugees from environmental collapse and economic upheaval. I examine this archetype, comparing migration from more-eroded counties and less-eroded counties to distinguish Dust Bowl migrants from other migrants in this era....

During the 1930s the federal government embarked upon an ambitious series of grant programs designed to counteract the Great Depression. The amounts distributed varied widely across the country and potentially contributed to population shifts. We estimate an aggregate discrete choice model, in...

I examine the determinants of inter-state migration of adults within western Germany, using the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2000. I highlight the prevalence and distinctive characteristics of migrants who do not change employers. Same-employer migrants represent one fifth of all...

The paper develops a tractable econometric model of optimal migration, focusing on expected income as the main economic influence on migration. The model improves on previous work in two respects: it covers optimal sequences of location decisions (rather than a single once-for-all choice), and...

In 1900, 90 percent of America?s black population lived in the South and only 4.3 percent of those born in the region era living elsewhere. By 1950 the proportion of blacks living in the South had declined to 68 percent and 19.6 percent of those born in the region had left it. Using samples...

The presence of a westward-moving frontier of settlement shaped early U.S. history. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the American frontier fostered individualism. We investigate the Frontier Thesis and identify its long-run implications for culture and...

A large literature following Ruhm (2000) suggests that mortality falls during recessions and rises during booms. The panel-data approach used to generate these results assumes that either there is no substantial migration response to temporary changes in local economic conditions, or that any...

We study the drivers of geographic variation in US health care utilization, using an empirical strategy that exploits migration of Medicare patients to separate the role of demand and supply factors. Our approach allows us to account for demand differences driven by both observable and...

This paper studies the impact that capital market imperfections have on the natural" selection of the most efficient firms by estimating the effect of the pre-deregulation level of" leverage on the survival of trucking firms after the Carter deregulation. Highly leveraged" carriers are less...