Abstract
Were individuals’ decisions to move to or stay in New York determined by the same kind of real wage comparisons that drove transatlantic and trans-Appalachian migrations? Probably not.
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Notes
- 1.
Margo’s specification did not provide for the possibility of time-varying coefficients on rental unit characteristics. Thus, while the general level of rents could vary from year to year, the percentage impact on rent of, for example, the number of rooms in the unit could not. It is unlikely that Margo had enough observations on specific characteristics in a sufficient number of years to estimate time-varying coefficients reliably.
- 2.
New York City’s most densely population neighborhood in 2013, at 103,000 per square mile was the Upper East Side.
- 3.
Data in this and the subsequent paragraph were drawn from a Web site, the Historical Census Browser, maintained by the University of Virginia that was subsequently discontinued.
- 4.
One formulation of Zipf’s law, the equation
$${ \ln }\left({\text{Rank}} \right){ = }\alpha{ + }\beta{ \ln }\left({\text{Population}} \right),$$where α and β are constants, fits the data closely, and β is close to 1.00. For the 99 largest U.S. urban areas in 1860, with New York and Kings Counties combined, the estimate,
$${ \ln }\left({\text{Rank}} \right){ = }13.89{ - }1.02{ \ln }\left({\text{Population}} \right),$$has an r-squared statistic of 0.99, and the estimate of β is very precise (Gabaiz, 1999; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998).
- 5.
Christine Stansell points out that domestic servants account for between one-half and two-thirds “of the unskilled workers, male and female, who opened accounts each year at the New York Bank for Savings.” (Stansell, 1987, p. 157).
- 6.
Multivariate analysis indicated that the importance of recent immigrant status as a determinant of how a respondent was matched with his or her job diminished substantially, but remained statistically significant, in specifications that controlled for ability to speak English, firm size, and an interaction term between occupational homogeneity and native-born African-American identity. Elliot cites evidence that, although the overall incidence of insider-referral hiring was not particularly high among African-American respondents, a large proportion of black respondents who were employed in ethnically homogeneous firms did find these jobs through social contacts. Ernst argues that this finding indicates that, because of employer prejudice, it is difficult for African-Americans to dominate employment in a firm, but once such closure does occur, it can be sustained through referral hiring. This analysis seems consistent with the view that job matching through social networks can, in part, reflect the impact of prejudice in the labor market (Elliot, 2001, pp. 413–420).
- 7.
These statistics are based on tabulations from manuscripts of the 1855 New York State census. The data set reported by Ernst includes numerous inconsistencies. In nine of the 109 tabulated occupations, for example, the number of foreign-born workers exceeds total employment. The statistics are worth citing, nonetheless, because the differences between percentage of specific country origin in particular occupations and overall immigrant percentage from said country were large (Ernst, 1994, p. 217).
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Gurwitz, A. (2019). The Attractions of the Slums. In: Atlantic Metropolis. Palgrave Studies in American Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13352-8_8
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