When the Levee Breaks: Black Migration and Economic Development in the American South

By Richard A. Hornbeck, Suresh Naidu. 2012

312 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the American South, post-bellum economic stagnation has been partially attributed to white landowners' access to low-wage black labor; indeed, Southern economic convergence from 1940 to 1970 was associated with substantial black out-migration. This paper examines the impact of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 on agricultural development. Flooded counties experienced an immediate and persistent out-migration of black population. Over time, landowners in flooded counties dramatically mechanized and modernized agricultural production 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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0606d719c112e3b23451d4b71345768ef2f18f68

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Sociology and Political Science

In Urban Studies

Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Disasters on Inflation (2017, unknown): “Boustan et al. (2012) find outward migration from areas affected by tornadoes, Hornbeck (2012) from heavily eroded counties in the Dust Bowl era, and Hornbeck and Naidu (2014) document substantial outward migration following the 1927 Mississippi floods.”
Immigration and Wage Dynamics: Evidence from the Mexican Peso Crisis (2020, methodology): “The seminal contribution of Kennan and Walker (2011) introduces a dynamic migration model instead. The multiple locations and migration histories that workers can choose makes this problem particularly hard. They simplify in two respects. First, they only take into account a subset of the possible c”
The effect of natural disasters on economic activity in US counties: A century of data (2020, unknown): “…changes in crop yields on migration from rural US counties. on Hurricane Andrew; Hornbeck 2012 and Long and Siu 2018 on the Dustbowl; Hornbeck and Naidu 2014 on the 1927 Mississippi flood; and Vigdor 2008, Sastry and Gregory 2014, Bleemer and Van der Klaauw 2017 and Deryugina,…”
Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics (2015, unknown): “Clearly Established Randomness in Treatment A set of studies that are particularly successful in establishing randomness in the treatment assignment are the papers by Johnson et al. (2006) and Agarwal et al.”
The Rise of the Machines: Automation, Horizontal Innovation, and Income Inequality (2014, background): “The associated empirical literature is smaller, but Lewis (2001) finds that low-skill immigration slows down the adoption of automation technology and Hornbeck and Naidu (2014) find that the emigration of black workers from the American South favored the adoption of modern agricultural production te”
What Do We Learn from the Weather? The New Climate-Economy Literature (2014, background): “43 Hsiang, Meng and Cane (2011) find suggestive but statistically insignificant evidence that around 40% of the conflict episodes associated with El Nino are displaced in time.”
Household Finance after a Natural Disaster: The Case of Hurricane Katrina (2014, background): “(40)See Hornbeck and Naidu [2014] and Morse [2011] for two recent examples.”