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 most entrepreneurial. I propose two factors to explain the immigrant-native difference in self-employment. The pull factor is expanding ethnic enclaves and the push factor is the deterioration of job opportunities in the wage sector of labor market. I find wage expectation was negatively associated with immigrant being self-employed while a larger immigrant community size was correlated with higher self-employment tendency. I apply a difference-in-differences approach to study the effects of the Immigration Acts in the 1920s and find the restrictions reduced the probability of self-employment for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. By linking fathers and sons in the Censuses, I show a second-generation immigrant was more likely to enter self-employment than a native son even if both had a self-employed father, suggesting less career mobility for immigrant children.
The Effects of Trading with the Enemy Act on German Newspapers [Draft]
How does discrimination affect immigrant business? To answer this question, I assemble novel data from the N.W. Ayer and Son’s Newspaper Annual Directories to measure the presence of ethnic press in the US between 1910 and 1920 when World War I took place. In 1917, Trading with the Enemy Act was passed and one of the sections required foreign prints on international affairs to be translated into English. I examine the impact of discrimination on German newspapers by exploiting the passage of the Act and WWI casualty which serves a proxy for local anti-German sentiment. My difference-in-differences estimates show that the Act reduced the number and circulation of German newspapers at county level. The fractions of German newspapers with political affiliations decreased while independent newspapers were largely unaffected. The Act did not influence the publication frequency, but the share of bilingual newspapers increased.
Community and Schooling of Second-generation Immigrants in the Age of Mass Migration
In this paper, I study the impact of ethnic enclaves on school and labor market decisions of second- generation immigrants. I exploit exogenous variation in immigration to US cities between 1910 and 1930 induced by World War I and the Immigration Acts of 1920s to construct instruments for location choices of immigrants and their children. I disentangle the effects of first-generation immigrants from those of immigrant children. I find that second-generation immigrants were more likely to attend elementary schools but less likely to go to secondary schools if they lived with more peers in the same ethnic group. In addition, when they reached the minimum age for employment, they preferred work instead of staying in schools. On the other hand, first-generation immigrants reduced the rate of school attendance in the stage of primary education while raised the rate of employment for second gens who are at the age of secondary education.
The Effects of Child Support Guidelines: Cognitive Outcomes of Young Children and Mother Behavior [Draft]
This paper estimates the effects of child support guidelines on young children's cognitive skills using panel variation in the policy. Data from the NLSY79 indicates that the establishment of guidelines improves children's PIAT math score at age 5. This impact is more significant for children born to married mothers and white mothers. The guidelines also reduced the probability of divorce among married mothers as well as the labor supply of mothers. These results are helpful to understand how the guidelines affect children's academic outcomes.