TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bodenhorn,Howard
AU  - Ruebeck,Christopher S.
TI  - Colorism and African American Wealth: Evidence from the Nineteenth-Century South
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11732
PY  - 2005
Y2  - November 2005
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11732
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11732.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Howard Bodenhorn
John E. Walker Department of Economics
College of Business and Behavioral Science
201-B Sirrine Hall
Clemson University
Clemson, SC 29634
Tel: 864/656-4335
E-Mail: bodenhorn@gmail.com

Christopher Ruebeck
Simon Center
Department of Economics
Lafayette College
Easton, PA 18042
http://sites.lafayette.edu/ruebeckc/
E-Mail: ruebeckc@lafayette.edu
AB  - Black is not always black. Subtle distinctions in skin tone translate into significant differences in outcomes. Data on more than 15,000 households interviewed during the 1860 federal census exhibit sharp differences in wealth holdings between white, mulatto, and black households in the urban South. We document these differences, investigate the relationships between wealth and the recorded household characteristics, and decompose the wealth gaps into treatment and characteristic effects. In addition to higher wealth holdings of white households as compared to free African-Americans in general, there are distinct differences between both the characteristics of and wealth of free mulatto and black households, whether male- or female-headed. While black-headed households' mean predicted log wealth was only 20% of white-headed households', mulatto-headed households' was nearly 50% that of whites'. The difference between light- and dark-complexion is highly significant in semi-log wealth regressions. In the decomposition of this wealth differential, treatment effects play a large role in explaining the wealth gap between all subpopulation pairs.
ER  -