Jason Long

Rural-Urban Migration and Socioeconomic Mobility in Victorian Britain

This article analyzes rural-urban migration in Great Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Using a new dataset of 28,000 individuals matched between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the selection process and treatment effect of migration, controlling for the endogeneity of the migration decision. I find that urban migrants were positively selected—the best of the rural labor pool—and that the economic benefits of migration were substantial. Migrants responded to market signals, and labor markets were largely efficient; however, not all gains from migration were exploited, potentially indicating some degree of inefficiency.

The Path to Convergence: Intergenerational Occupational Mobility in Britain and the US in Three Eras

Late nineteenth-century intergenerational occupational mobility was higher in the US than in Britain. Differences between them in this type of mobility are absent today. Using data on 10,000 US and British father and son pairs followed over two intervals (the 1860s and 1870s, and the 1880s and 1890s), we examine how this convergence occurred. The US remained more mobile then Britain through 1900 but the difference fell over the last two decades of the nineteenth century (as British mobility rose) and was erased by the 1950s (as mobility fell by more in the US than in Britain).

The Socioeconomic Return to Primary Schooling in Victorian England

In this article I provide a micro-level analysis of primary schooling in Victorian England. Using a new dataset of school-age males linked between the 1851 and 1881 population censuses, I examine the determinants of childhood school attendance and the impact of attendance on adult labor market outcomes. I find that schooling had a positive effect on adult occupational class and that the associated wage gains were likely to have outweighed the cost of schooling. However, this effect was small relative to fathers class, and the effect of education on earnings appears to have been small relative to modern results.

Grandfathers Matter(ed): Occupational Mobility Across Three Generations in the US and Britain, 1850–1911

Nearly all intergenerational mobility studies focus on fathers and sons. The possibility that the process is more than simply two‐generational (AR(1)) has been difficult to assess because of the lack of the necessary multi‐generational data. We remedy this shortcoming with new data that links grandfathers, fathers and sons in Britain and the US between 1850 and 1910. We find that grandfathers mattered: even controlling for fathers occupation, grandfathers occupation significantly influenced the occupation of the grandson. For both Britain and the US in this time period, therefore, assessments based on two‐generation estimates significantly overstate the true amount of social mobility.