Dissertation Defense: “Essays on Inequality and Methods in United States History”, Micah Villarreal

Speaker

Micah Villarreal, PhD Candidate, University of California, Santa Barbara

Title

“Essays on Inequality and Methods in United States History”, Micah Villarreal

Abstract

In the first chapter, Black Gold: The Effect of Wealth on Descendants of the Enslaved, I leverage quasi-random oil discoveries on Black-owned land in the early 1900s to study how positive wealth shocks affected Black economic progress in the short and long term. I establish that wealth receipt in this context can be treated as a random shock. Effects of the oil windfall on later-life wealth are modest, but the most consistent and compelling effects appear in early-life human capital. Treated children were significantly less likely to work, more likely to be literate, and—if young enough when the windfall occurred—ultimately achieved higher levels of educational attainment. These gains are quantitatively meaningful, and they align with a later rise in white-collar employment and homeownership among adults.

The second chapter details the construction of the datasets used in Black Gold: The Effect of Wealth on Descendants of the Enslaved. I describe the digitization and geocoding of allotment maps, integration with historical oil well data, and construction of a royalty payment panel from archival ledgers. It outlines the creation of a comprehensive database of Creek citizens using both public and digitized sources and presents a multi- stage strategy for linking individuals to the 1910–1940 Censuses using a combination of algorithmic, genealogical, and manual methods. It also explains the derivation of death information using social security records and online genealogy tools. This document provides a transparent and replicable framework for high-resolution historical linkage work.

The final chapter explores whether variation in the aggregate status of nonwhite Americans relative to white Americans in the Jim Crow South has a relationship with racist sentiments, as proxied by Ku Klux Klan (KKK) activity. I report some estimates of the relationship between three possible measures of relative status and KKK activity at a county level. I find that there is a strong and positive relationship between nonwhite income and KKK activity. I propose that such a relationship could be explained by “last-place aversion” on the part of poor white Southerners.