Why Have Racial Gaps in Occupational Mobility Persisted Across Generations?
Durlauf, Kim, Lee, and Song (forthcoming) examine how Black-White differences in occupational mobility have changed since the Civil War. They combine linked U.S. census records and 10 large surveys covering 1850–2021 to track occupations across generations. They find especially large gains for Black men born in 1940–1950, with changes in mobility explaining more than 80% of their shift toward non-manual work. Barriers to moving from manual to non-manual occupations also fell sharply for Black men—from nearly 20 generations historically to about three generations by the 1960–1970 cohort. However, persistent downward-mobility differences help explain why racial occupational gaps remain.
Why This Article Was Selected for The Policy Scientist
Intergenerational mobility is important because it reveals how strongly family background continues to shape economic opportunity across generations. Racial differences in mobility remain an important dimension of economic inequality in the United States and provide a way to assess whether Black-White occupational gaps have narrowed across generations. The long historical perspective of this article is especially valuable for understanding the persistence of these differences. The unusually extensive census and survey data, spanning more than 170 years, are a major strength and provide considerable historical generalizability within the United States. The Markov-chain methods and counterfactual decompositions are sophisticated, although primarily descriptive. Future research using credible causal-inference designs could better identify why racial mobility patterns changed. The article is forthcoming in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, a major journal for empirical applied economics.
Full Citation and Link to Article
Durlauf, S. N., Kim, G., Lee, D., & Song, X. (forthcoming). The evolution of Black-White differences in occupational mobility across post-Civil War America. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. American Economic Association.
Central Research Question
The study asks how differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White American men have evolved since the Civil War and how those mobility patterns have contributed to persistent racial differences in occupations. Rather than concentrating on income, the authors examine whether sons move into different occupational classes than their fathers and whether those transition patterns have become more similar across racial groups over time. A central concern is whether contemporary occupational differences primarily reflect historically unequal starting positions or continuing differences in the processes that move people between occupations.
The analysis also asks when major changes occurred, which mechanisms contributed to them, and how long occupational advantages or disadvantages associated with family background persist across generations. Particular attention is devoted to the 1940–1950 birth cohort, which experienced unusually large changes in occupational mobility.
Previous Literature
The study builds on a substantial literature documenting racial differences in intergenerational mobility. Bhattacharya and Mazumder (2011), Mazumder (2014), and Chetty et al. (2020) find that Black Americans generally experience lower upward mobility and greater downward mobility than White Americans. Collins and Wanamaker (2022) extend this historical perspective by examining mobility across the longer post-Civil War period. Much of this literature, however, emphasizes income rather than occupations.
The occupational approach draws partly on research arguing that occupations capture dimensions of socioeconomic position that income measures may overlook. Björklund and Jäntti (2000) and Mazumder and Acosta (2015) provide important foundations for considering alternative measures of intergenerational mobility. The study also connects with the sociological tradition represented by Prais (1955), Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992), Featherman, Jones, and Hauser (1975), and Sobel, Hout, and Duncan (1985), particularly in distinguishing changes caused by broad economic restructuring from changes in individuals’ relative positions within an occupational hierarchy.
The analysis of geographic mobility also intersects with research on the Great Migration. Derenoncourt (2022), for example, demonstrates that migration and destination conditions could have complicated rather than uniformly improved subsequent economic mobility among Black Americans.
Data
The dataset is unusually extensive historically. It combines linked historical U.S. census records with ten contemporary large-scale surveys, producing evidence covering 1850 through 2021. The historical component links fathers and sons across censuses between 1850 and 1940, while the modern surveys extend the analysis from the 1960s through the early twenty-first century.
The principal sample consists of Black and White men born from approximately 1856 through 1975. Individuals are organized into six broad birth cohorts centered on 1860–1870, 1880–1890, 1900–1910, 1920–1930, 1940–1950, and 1960–1970. The authors harmonize occupational classifications across historical and contemporary datasets, along with information about education and geographic location.
The primary analysis divides occupations into three categories: non-manual, manual, and farming. More detailed five- and seven-category classifications are also examined to identify specific occupational transitions. This harmonization permits comparisons across more than a century despite substantial changes in the American economy and occupational structure.
Methods
The authors construct occupational transition matrices showing the probabilities that sons enter different occupational categories conditional on their fathers’ occupations. They treat these matrices as Markov processes, allowing them to examine both immediate intergenerational transitions and the longer-run implications of each cohort’s mobility structure.
Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder-style decompositions separate changes associated with initial occupational distributions from changes produced by the transition process itself. Counterfactual exercises then estimate what occupational distributions would have looked like under alternative mobility regimes. Additional counterfactual transition matrices hold education or geographic location constant, allowing the authors to assess whether changing educational attainment or migration between the South and non-South better accounts for observed changes.
The study introduces two particularly useful measures of persistence. Mean first passage time estimates how many generations, on average, a mobility system would require to move from one occupational category to another. Measures of “memory” estimate how rapidly the influence of an initial occupational distribution disappears as the system approaches its long-run steady state. These methods characterize historical mobility processes and counterfactual dynamics rather than identifying causal treatment effects.
Findings/Size Effects
The largest transformation occurs among Black men in the 1940–1950 birth cohort. Changes in occupational transition patterns substantially increased movement away from manual occupations and toward non-manual employment. Between the 1920–1930 and 1940–1950 cohorts, changes in transition patterns account for more than 80 percent of the changes in occupational shares among Black men. For the decline in manual employment specifically, approximately 86 percent is attributable to structural changes in mobility.
Educational change appears more consequential than geographic migration. Counterfactual exercises indicate that improvements in education contributed substantially more to occupational mobility than movement between the South and non-South. Thus, the historical decline in occupational inequality cannot be explained primarily as a consequence of geographic relocation.
The size of the historical mobility bottleneck is especially striking. For early Black cohorts, the estimated mean time required for the mobility system to move individuals from manual to non-manual occupations was nearly 20 generations. This fell below ten generations by the 1900–1910 cohort and reached roughly three generations for the 1960–1970 cohort. Among White men, the corresponding measure declined from about 4.8 to 2.5 generations. Consequently, the very large historical racial difference in upward occupational mobility became negligible by the most recent cohort.
More detailed occupational categories reveal similarly substantial changes. For Black men moving from semi-skilled or unskilled manual work into professional or managerial occupations, the estimated passage time fell from 16.9 generations for the 1900–1910 cohort to 8.8 for the 1920–1930 cohort and 4.7 for the 1940–1950 cohort.
Downward mobility displays a different pattern. The estimated passage time from non-manual to manual occupations remains comparatively stable. It ranges from approximately 1.5 to 2.4 generations for Black men versus 2.7 to 3.5 generations for White men. The racial difference therefore remains about one generation even among recent cohorts, indicating continuing differences in the risk of movement toward manual employment.
Family occupational origins also retain surprisingly long influence. Under the mobility regime observed for the 1940–1950 cohort, the occupational system requires approximately five generations to approach its steady state. Translating generations into years implies that the influence of initial family occupational conditions can persist for approximately 125–150 years. Moreover, improvement in the rate at which this historical “memory” dissipates continues for White men but largely stalls for Black men beginning around the 1940–1950 cohort.
Conclusion
The study concludes that Black-White occupational differences have narrowed substantially since the post-Civil War period, but convergence has been incomplete. The most consequential improvement occurred for Black men in the 1940–1950 birth cohort, when major changes in occupational transition patterns accelerated movement toward non-manual work. Subsequent cohorts did not sustain improvement at the same rate.
The results also distinguish historical starting conditions from continuing mobility processes. Equalizing initial occupational distributions alone would leave much of the racial occupational difference intact, whereas imposing White mobility dynamics on Black men would produce substantially smaller occupational gaps. Persistent differences therefore reflect not simply inherited historical occupational distributions but differences in the mechanisms governing movement between occupations.
The broader implication is that occupational mobility contains substantial historical persistence. Although one of the largest barriers to upward movement has diminished dramatically, differences in downward mobility and the persistence of family occupational origins remain. By combining more than 170 years of evidence with measures of mobility bottlenecks and intergenerational persistence, the analysis provides a long-run account of both the considerable convergence that has occurred and the mechanisms associated with the occupational differences that remain.
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