TY - JOUR AU - Collins, William J AU - Wanamaker, Marianne H TI - Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 19124 PY - 2013 Y2 - June 2013 DO - 10.3386/w19124 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19124 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w19124.pdf N1 - Author contact info: William J. Collins Department of Economics Vanderbilt University VU Station B #351819 2301 Vanderbilt Place Nashville, TN 37235-1819 Tel: 615/322-3428 Fax: NA E-Mail: william.collins@vanderbilt.edu Marianne H. Wanamaker Department of Economics University of Tennessee 524 Stokely Management Center Knoxville, TN 37996 Tel: 865/974-1700 E-Mail: wanamaker@utk.edu AB - The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the U.S. South, arguably the most important internal migration in U.S. history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migration? How large were the migrants' gains? Did migration narrow the racial gap in economic status? We find evidence of positive selection, but the migrants' gains were large. A substantial amount of black-white convergence in this period is attributable to migration. ER -