Development of American Cities
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 3, 2026 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (EST)
- Chair: Jonathan I. Dingel, Columbia University
The Economic Geography of American Slavery
Abstract
We study the economic structure of U.S. slavery on the eve of the Civil War andquantify the welfare gains from emancipation. We consider three facets of the institu-
tion of slavery: first, enslaved persons were coerced into supplying more labor than they
would have chosen; second, slaveholders acted like monopsonists when setting enslaved
persons’ consumption and labor; and third, slaveholders misallocated enslaved persons
across occupations and locations to maximize output rather than utility. We develop a
novel quantitative general equilibrium spatial model of slavery featuring each of these
facets and use detailed spatial microdata to document a number of stylized facts con-
sistent with the model predictions. We then combine the data with the framework to
estimate how dismantling the institution of slavery affected the spatial economy. We
find that the (equivalent variation) welfare gains from emancipation for enslaved per-
sons exceeded 1,100%, with coercion (196%), monopsony (160%) and mis-allocation
(56%) all contributing importantly to the gains. Emancipation also increased U.S.
GDP (16.8%), although the welfare of free persons fell by 0.8%. Finally, we show that
the counterfactual changes in labor allocations from emancipation is strongly correlated
with observed patterns of population movements following the Civil War, although the
actual reallocations are smaller than the model predicts
How Important Are Cultural Frictions for Internal Migration? Evidence from the Nineteenth Century United States
Abstract
We propose a new measure of cultural distance based on the composition of first names and church denominations. We estimate the elasticity of migration flows with respect to these components as well as a measure of travel costs in the United States between 1850 and 1870. We use an economic geography model of migration to quantify their welfare implications. We find that travel costs are substantially more important than cultural distance for aggregate welfare.Of Boom and Ghost Towns: Early City Formation during the California Gold Rush
Abstract
In this paper, we study the determinants of death and survival of cities and the underlying micro-economic decisions about migration and occupational choice of workers. We employ the end of California Gold Rush in the 1860s as a large, permanent shock to the urban structure of early California to investigate, 1) what factors makes cities resilient to large, adverse shocks in the long-run, and 2) along which margins are workers adjusting when exposed to a large, adverse shock, and how the urban system interacts with these margins. In particular, we propose early scope -- the sector diversification away from the initial advantage -- as a force that mitigates sector-level shocks and leads to a persistent urban structure beyond scale and natural advantages as suggested by the previous literature. To capture the long-run nature of urban systems, we construct a rich panel dataset of settlements and workers in California using restricted census full counts encompassing 150 years of data. Moreover, we develop a dynamic, quantitative economic geography model to better understand the role of sector diversity, the emergence of ghost towns and workers' adjustment margins in the formation of modern California.Discussant(s)
Allison Shertzer
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Stephan Heblich
,
University of Toronto
Allison Green
,
London School of Economics
Jeffrey Lin
,
Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
JEL Classifications
- N9 - Regional and Urban History