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Black and White Names: Evolution and Determinants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2022
Abstract
Black and white Americans tend to have different names today. This divide was long in the making. I show that the racial divergence in naming patterns was a gradual and continuous process spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I then exploit the migration of households from the South to determine if place matters for name choices. Children born after their households moved receive names that are less black or more white than their older siblings, a difference that widens with time spent outside the South. This may reflect the cultural assimilation of households rather than a response to economic incentives.
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- © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association
Footnotes
I am grateful to Bob Margo, Bill Collins, and Dan Fetter for useful comments and suggestions.
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