The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States
How durable are regional cultures within the United States? We study the long-run persistence of first-name distributions at the county level between 1850 and 1930. We recover distinct cultural groups through an unsupervised clustering algorithm and show that these groups match well-known patterns of settlement and are persistent over time. The most important divide is between the North and the South, but finer partitions reveal historically interpretable subregions, including New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the upland South, and the Deep South. Our results have implications for theories that link cultural homogeneity and the development of pluralistic institutions as well as theories of path dependence in development.
-
-
Copy CitationTaylor Jaworski and Erik O. Kimbrough, "The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States," NBER Working Paper 34958 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34958.Download Citation
-
Related
More from the NBER
In addition to working papers, the NBER disseminates affiliates’ latest findings through a range of free periodicals—the NBER Reporter, the NBER Digest, the Bulletin on Health, the Bulletin on the Economics of Alzheimer's, and the Bulletin on Entrepreneurship—as well as research spotlights, lectures, and panel videos.
