“You’re Not from around Here”: Regional Naming and Life Outcomes

Abstract

AbstractWe examine the socioeconomic consequences of discrimination against people of Southern origins during the US Great Migration of the first half of the twentieth century. We ask whether people living in the American North and Midwest in 1940 fared worse with respect to education, occupation, and income if they were perceived to be of Southern origins. We also assess variation in these effects across racial groups and across actual region of origin groups. Using linked data from the 1920 and 1940 US censuses, we compare the life outcomes of about half a million pairs of brothers who differed with respect to the regional origin implied by their first names. For both Whites and Blacks, we find statistically significant associations between outcomes and the regional origin implied by names; regardless of where they were born, men living in the North or Midwest in 1940 did worse if their names implied Southern origins. However, these associations are entirely confounded by family-specific cultural, socioeconomic, and other factors that shaped both family naming practices and life outcomes. This finding—that regional discrimination in the early-twentieth-century United States did not happen based on names—contrasts sharply with findings from research in more recent years that uses names as proxies for people’s risk of exposure to various forms of discrimination. Whereas names are a basis for discrimination in modern times, they were not a basis for regional discrimination in an era in which people had more immediate and direct evidence about regional origins.