Labor mobility in American and Indian economic history

This thesis undertakes three cliometric explorations of labor markets in the United States and India. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between African-American migration and foreign-born migration to the urban North, and Chapter 3 investigates the extraordinary labor market experiences of black workers in the 1940s. The third exploration, in Chapter 4, documents and analyzes wage trends across regions in India in the late 19{dollar}sp{lcub}rm th{rcub}{dollar} century. In each one of these cases, rapidly changing economic circumstances competed with established social customs to determine the extent and form of labor mobility.; Chapter 2 undertakes an empirical assessment of the "immigrant-as-deterrent" hypothesis regarding black emigration from the South. This notion, which has stood in the historical literature for decades without careful empirical assessment, suggests that in the late 19{dollar}sp{lcub}rm th{rcub}{dollar} and early 20{dollar}sp{lcub}rm th{rcub}{dollar} centuries the plentiful supply of foreign-born migrants to northern labor markets crowded potential black migrants out of those labor markets by limiting the quantity and scope of employment opportunities available to blacks. The analysis of state and city-level panel data on migration patterns provides support for this interpretation.; The 1940s stand out as an extraordinary decade of black economic progress relative to whites, but there have been few econometric studies of black laborers and none of federal anti-discrimination policy in that decade. Chapter 3 draws on two unique data sets to glean some insights into the 1940s. First, retrospective work histories taken in 1951 are used to follow workers through occupational, industrial and geographic moves across the 1940s. Among other things, it is found that black workers in defense-related industries earned significant wage premiums over other blacks. Then, city-level data on black/white employment ratios in defense-related industries are used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC). The FEPC appears to have played a key role in opening employment opportunities to black workers in those industries.; The dissertation's focus shifts away from the United States to India in Chapter 4 and investigates how the late 19{dollar}sp{lcub}rm th{rcub}{dollar} century's "transportation revolution" affected labor markets in India. The footprints of this impact are searched for in district-level wage and price data from 1873 to 1906. Falling transport costs could have promoted regional wage convergence by facilitating both labor mobility and interregional commodity trade. There is, however, only qualified evidence of wage convergence in late 19{dollar}sp{lcub}rm th{rcub}{dollar} century India, and it appears that the steady-state geographic dispersion of wages was not compressed by the forces of "globalization."...