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Black and White Names: Evolution and Determinants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2022

Hui Ren Tan
Hui Ren Tan*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore. E-mail: huiren@nus.edu.sg.
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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.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 82 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 959 - 1002
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Bob Margo, Bill Collins, and Dan Fetter for useful comments and suggestions.

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