{"id":26745,"date":"2012-11-29T21:43:58","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T21:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26745"},"modified":"2013-05-11T01:02:44","modified_gmt":"2013-05-11T01:02:44","slug":"race-skin-color-and-economic-outcomes-in-early-twentieth-century-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26745","title":{"rendered":"Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em>Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Stanford University Job Market Paper<br \/>\n2012-11-28<br \/>\n53 pages<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"mailto:roymill@stanford.edu\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Roy Mill<\/strong><\/a><br \/>\nDepartment of Economics<br \/>\nStanford University<\/p>\n<p><strong><a href=\"mailto:lstein@stanford.edu\" target=\"_blank\">Luke C.D. Stein<\/a><\/strong><br \/>\nDepartment of Economics<br \/>\nStanford University<\/p>\n<p>We study the effect of race on economic outcomes using unique data from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which skin color was explicitly coded in population censuses as \u201cWhite,\u201d \u201cBlack,\u201d or \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=451\" target=\"_blank\">Mulatto<\/a>.\u201d We construct a panel of siblings by digitizing and matching records across the 1910 and 1940 censuses and identifying all 12,000 African-American families in which enumerators classified some children as light-skinned (\u201cMulatto\u201d) and others as dark-skinned (\u201cBlack\u201d). Siblings coded \u201cMulatto\u201d when they were children (in 1910) earned similar wages as adults (in 1940) relative to their Black siblings. This within-family earnings difference is substantially lower than the Black-Mulatto earnings difference in the general population, suggesting that skin color in itself played only a small role in the racial earnings gap. To explore the role of the more social aspect that might be associated with being Black, we then focus on individuals who \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=5864\" target=\"_blank\">passed for White<\/a>,\u201d an important social phenomenon at the time. To do so, we identify individuals coded \u201cMulatto\u201d as children but \u201cWhite\u201d as adults. Passing for White meant that individuals changed their racial affiliation by changing their social ties, while skin color remained unchanged. Passing was associated with substantially higher earnings, suggesting that race in its social formcould have significant consequences for economic outcomes. We discuss how our findings shed light on the roles of discrimination and identity in driving economic outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>Read the entire paper <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/~roymill\/cgi-bin\/personal\/getFile.php?fid=7\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America Stanford University Job Market Paper 2012-11-28 53 pages Roy Mill Department of Economics Stanford University Luke C.D. Stein Department of Economics Stanford University We study the effect of race on economic outcomes using unique data from the first half of the twentieth century, a period [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,14647,6,14,6462,394,20],"tags":[12955,12954,3233],"class_list":["post-26745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-census","category-economics","category-new-media","category-papers","category-passing-2","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-luke-c-d-stein","tag-roy-mill","tag-stanford-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}