This article studies the effect of recruitment restrictions on mobility and wages in the postbellum U.S. South. I estimate the effects of criminal fines charged for “enticement” (recruiting workers already under contract) on sharecropper mobility, tenancy choice, and agricultural wages. I find that a $13 (10%) increase in the enticement fine lowered the probability of a move by black sharecroppers by 12%, daily wages by 1 cent (.1%), and the returns to experience for blacks by 0.6% per year. These results are consistent with an on‐the‐job search model, where the enticement fine raises the cost of recruiting an employed worker.

Ilyana Kuziemko of Princeton University and Suresh Naidu of Columbia University review “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era” by Gary Gerstle. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Examines the history of the political order that took shape under Ronald Reagan and achieved dominance under Bill Clinton in the 1990s and early 2000s, highlighting the sharp distinction of this political order from those that preceded it.”

In the American South, postbellum economic development may have been restricted in part by white landowners' access to low-wage black labor. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on black out-migration and subsequent agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties modernized agricultural production and increased its capital intensity relative to landowners in nearby similar non-flooded counties. Landowners resisted black out-migration, however, benefiting from the status quo system of labor-intensive agricultural production.

We argue that the Democratic Party’s evolution on economic policy helps explain partisan realignment by education. First, we document that educated Americans differentially oppose “predistribution” (e.g., job guarantees, higher minimum wages, protectionism, and stronger unions), while the educational gradient for redistribution (taxes and transfers) is close to zero. These relationships have been largely unchanged since the 1940s. Second, focusing on politicians and donors as key party actors, we show that the Democratic Party has moved away from predistribution since the 1970s. The number of predistribution bills introduced by Democratic House Speakers has declined by half since the 1970s. Unions—the traditional lobbying force for predistribution—see their share of Democratic Party PAC donations decline from 90% to 40% from 1968 to 1980, following 1970s legislation that facilitated corporate PAC donations. From 1980 onward, the Democrats rely increasingly on individual contributions from educated donors relative to the Republicans. We show the increased reliance on corporate PACs and educated donors is driven by the rise of a self-described “New Democrat’’ faction particularly conservative on predistribution and social issues. Finally, we trace the reaction of voters to these changes in the Democratic Party. Less-educated Americans begin to leave the party in the 1970s, after decades of serving as its base. We also show that in the crucial transition period of the 1970s through 1990s, New Democrat candidates outperform other Democrats among more-educated voters in both survey questions and actual Congressional elections. As the New Democrats are more socially conservative than other Democrats, their success with educated voters suggests that social issues alone cannot explain educational realignment.

We estimate long-run trends in intergenerational relative mobility for representative samples of the US-born population. Harmonizing all surveys that include father’s occupation and own family income, we develop a mobility measure that allows for the inclusion of nonwhite individuals and women for the 1910s–1970s birth cohorts. We show that mobility increases between the 1910s and 1940s cohorts and that the decline of Black-white income gaps explains about half of this rise. We also find that excluding Black Americans, particularly women, considerably overstates the level of mobility for twentieth-century birth cohorts while simultaneously understating its increase between the 1910s and 1940s.

Motivated by historical examples and ideas from socio-linguistics, in particular the “non-reciprocal power semantic” of Brown and Gilman (1960), we extend evolutionary models of language to incorporate intentional linguistic innovations among conventions that may convey social superiority and inferiority, despite being ambiguous, in the sense of less efficiency in communicating information. We show that egalitarian and unambiguous linguistic conventions can be stochastically stable but also identify conditions under which ambiguous linguistic conventions that are imperfect signals of status differences may be stochastically stable.

By exploiting a reform in the United Arab Emirates that relaxed restrictions on employer transitions, we provide new estimates of the monopsony power of firms over migrant workers. Our results show that the reform increased incumbent migrants’ earnings and firm retention. This occurs despite an increase in employer transitions and is driven by a fall in country exits. While the outcomes of incumbents improved, the reform decreased demand for new migrants and lowered their earnings. These results are consistent with a model of monopsony in which firms face upward-sloping labor supply curves for both new recruits in source countries and incumbent migrants.

This study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict. We examine land invasions in Brazil using a panel data set with over 50,000 municipality-year observations. Adverse economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings. This effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems, but not by other observable variables. In highly unequal municipalities, negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality. Cross-sectional estimates using fine within-region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict.