Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the US 1910-1940. [Draft]
(Job Market Paper)
This paper studies immigrant entrepreneurship in the early twentieth century. Using the full count US Censuses, I document the widening gap between immigrants and native whites in self-employment from 1910 to 1940. Immigrants from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe were the most entrepreneurial. I propose multiple factors to explain the immigrant- native difference in self-employment. Immigrants were more likely to become self-employed in cities where their wage expectations were lower and their ethnic enclaves were larger. A difference-in-differences approach shows that the self-employment gap between Southern and Eastern European immigrants and other immigrants narrowed by 0.8 percentage points following the Immigration Acts of the 1920s. By linking fathers and sons in the Censuses, I show that a second-generation immigrant was more likely to enter self-employment than a native son even if both had a self-employed father.
The Effects of Trading with the Enemy Act on German Newspapers. [Draft]
This paper estimates the effect of wartime discrimination on the ethnic newspaper market, using the collapse of the German-language press during World War I as a case study. Drawing on hand-digitized data from N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory (1909-1920) and 1910 Census controls, I compare German newspapers to Scandinavian (Swedish and Norwegian-Danish) newspapers which faced a similar secular decline and the same wartime regulatory environment, but not the anti-German hostility that followed U.S. entry into the war. Using city-language-year level data to capture market-wide effects, I find that the number of German newspapers fell by roughly 43% and total German circulation by roughly 48% relative to the Scandinavian control, with effects beginning in 1917 and growing through 1920. Event-study estimates show no differential pre-trends through 1916, supporting a causal interpretation. The results document how an external shock to public attitudes can reshape an entire ethnic business ecosystem.
Community and Schooling of Second-generation Immigrants in the Age of Mass Migration. [Draft]
To answer if large co-ethnic communities draw the children of immigrants into work and out of school, I use US full-count census data for the 300 largest cities during the Age of Mass Migration (1910–1930) and estimate the effect of co-ethnic adult community size with a shift-share instrument built from 1900 settlement patterns and national inflows. A model of the schooling-work decision implies that if a co-ethnic labor-network channel is present, a larger community size would be harmful to schooling once children reach the legal working age of 14. Using the discontinuity at age 14, I find no evidence for such a channel. The adult-community effect on schooling becomes more favorable at older ages. In addition, larger co-ethnic adult communities are associated with lower school attendance among 7–13-year- olds and lower employment among 14–17-year-olds. These findings point toward cultural and resource mechanisms of immigrant enclaves.