Migrant self-selection and random shocks : evidence from the panic of 1907
Abstract
We study the impact of the 1907 Panic, the most severe economic crisis before the Great Depression, on the selection of Mexican immigration. We find that migrants were positively selected on height before the crisis. This pattern changed to negative selection during the crisis but returned to positive selection afterward. Adjustments in selection were partially mediated by the enganche, a historical labor-recruiting system that reduced migration costs but only for taller laborers with above-average earnings potential. We document that labor recruiting contributed to maintaining the relatively constant height profile of the migration flow in the short run.
Citation
Escamilla-Guerrero , D & López-Alonso , M 2023 , ' Migrant self-selection and random shocks : evidence from the panic of 1907 ' , Journal of Economic History , vol. 83 , no. 1 , pp. 45-85 . https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050722000535
Publication
Journal of Economic History
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0022-0507Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: This research was developed with the financial support of the Radwan Travel and Discovery Fund (2016) - LSE; the Pre-Dissertation Exploratory Grant (2017) - Economic History Association; and the Research Fund for Graduate Students (2017) - Economic History Society.Collections
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