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.

U.S. income inequality has varied inversely with union density over the past 100 years. But moving beyond this aggregate relationship has proven difficult, in part because of limited microdata on union membership prior to 1973. We develop a new source of microdata on union membership dating back to 1936, survey data primarily from Gallup (N ≈ 980,000), to examine the long-run relationship between unions and inequality. We document dramatic changes in the demographics of union members: when density was at its mid-century peak, union households were much less educated and more nonwhite than other households, whereas pre-World War II and today they are more similar to nonunion households on these dimensions. However, despite large changes in composition and density since 1936, the household union premium holds relatively steady between 10 and 20 log points. We use our data to examine the effect of unions on income inequality. Using distributional decompositions, time series regressions, state-year regressions, as well as a new instrumental-variable strategy based on the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board, we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s.

British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine the effects of labor demand shocks on prosecutions. Positive shocks in the textile, iron, and coal industries increased prosecutions. Following the abolition of criminal sanctions, wages differentially rose in counties that had experienced more prosecutions, and wages responded more to labor demand shocks. Coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial Britain; restricted mobility allowed workers to commit to risk-sharing contracts with lower, but less volatile, wages.

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibit considerable bunching at round numbers. We run two experiments randomizing wages around $0.10 and $1.00 to experimentally measure left-digit bias for identical tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk; we fail to find any evidence of discontinuity in the labor supply function at round numbers despite estimating a considerable degree of monopsony. We replicate these results in administrative worker-firm hourly wage data from Oregon. We can rule out inattention estimates found in the behavioral product market literature. We provide evidence that firms “misoptimize” wage setting. More monopsony requires less employer misoptimization to explain bunching.

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.