TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ferrie,Joseph P.
TI  - The End of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the U.S. Since 1850
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11324
PY  - 2005
Y2  - May 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11324
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11324.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Joseph P. Ferrie
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208-2600
Tel: 847/491-8210
Fax: 847/491-7001
E-Mail: ferrie@northwestern.edu
AB  - New longitudinal data on individuals linked across nineteenth century U.S. censuses document the geographic and occupational mobility of more than 75,000 Americans from the 1850s to the 1920s. Together with longitudinal data for more recent years, these data make possible for the first time systematic comparisons of mobility over the last 150 years of American economic development, as well as cross-national comparisons for the nineteenth century. The U.S. was a substantially more mobile economy than Britain between 1850 and 1880. But both intergenerational occupational mobility and geographic mobility have declined in the U.S. since the beginning of the twentieth century, leaving much less apparent two aspects of the %u201CAmerican Exceptionalism%u201D noted by nineteenth century observers.
ER  -