Browsing All Posts published on »November, 2014«

Migrant Self-Selection: Anthropometric Evidence from the Mass Migration of Italians to the United States, 1907–1925 (with Ariell Zimran)

November 5, 2014

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Are migrants positively or negatively self-selected from within their populations of origin? Ariell Zimran and I study this question by collecting data on the heights of Italian passengers arriving in Ellis Island between 1907 and 1925, matching them to their places of origins, and comparing their heights to that of their cohorts of origin.

Pogroms, Networks, and Migration: The Jewish Migration from the Russian Empire to the United States 1881–1914

November 5, 2014

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The migration of one and a half million Jews from the Russian Empire to the United States during the years 1881–1914 is commonly linked to the occurrence of pogroms, eruptions of anti-Jewish mob violence, that took place mainly in two waves in 1881–1882 and in 1903–1906. Although the common perception that pogroms were a major cause for Jewish migration is now questioned by historians, little quantitative evidence exists to support or refute this view. This paper addresses this question empirically, based on a large newly constructed data sets. The answer is a complex combination of a "yes" and a "no".