TY - JOUR AU - Abramitzky,Ran AU - Boustan,Leah Platt AU - Eriksson,Katherine TI - Have the Poor Always Been Less Likely to Migrate? Evidence From Inheritance Practices During the Age of Mass Migration JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 18298 PY - 2012 Y2 - August 2012 DO - 10.3386/w18298 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18298 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w18298.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Ran Abramitzky Department of Economics Stanford University 579 Serra Mall Stanford, CA 94305 Tel: 650/723-9276 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: ranabr@stanford.edu Leah Platt Boustan Princeton University Industrial Relations Section Louis A. Simpson International Bldg. Princeton, NJ 08544 Tel: 609-258-7116 E-Mail: lboustan@princeton.edu Katherine Eriksson Department of Economics University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616 E-Mail: kaeriksson@ucdavis.edu AB - Using novel data on 50,000 Norwegian men, we study the effect of wealth on the probability of internal or international migration during the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), a time when the US maintained an open border to European immigrants. We do so by exploiting variation in parental wealth and in expected inheritance by birth order, gender composition of siblings, and region. We find that wealth discouraged migration in this era, suggesting that the poor could be more likely to move if migration restrictions were lifted today. We discuss the implications of these historical findings to developing countries. ER -