The Workshop in History, Culture, and Society (HCS) presentation by Ellora Derenoncourt, PhD Candidate in Economics, Harvard University.

Abstract: Upward mobility rates in US locations are strongly negatively correlated with the black population share. However, a lack of experimental variation in racial composition and the sorting of families across space poses a dual challenge to  identifying the causal links behind this relationship. I leverage a large scale historical natural experiment in "Moving to Opportunity" to overcome these challenges: the massive exodus of African Americans from the US south from 1940  to 1970 during the Great Migration. I use the idiosyncratic component of early migrants' location choices and shocks to the southern economy during this period to generate plausibly exogenous increases in the black population in  northern cities. By combining these racial composition shocks with measures of neighborhood e ffects on mobility today, I show that two thirds of the relationship between historical black share changes and mobility can be attributed to  the causal e ffect and one third to composition and selection e ffects. Persistently higher residential racial segregation and private school enrollment rates in these areas imply local public goods mediate the migration's causal impact on mobility.