We’re pleased to continue the Stone Inequality seminar series with our next guest, Eric Chyn, an applied microeconomist and professor at The University of Texas, Austin. Chyn will be presenting his research on “Inequality and Racial Backlash: Evidence from the Reconstruction Era and the Freedmen’s Bureau.” This paper delves into how majority groups react to decreasing inequality in racially polarized settings, focusing on the Freedmen’s Bureau’s influence on political and social outcomes in the post-Civil War South.
Abstract
How do majority groups respond to a narrowing of inequality in racially polarized environments? We study this question by examining the effects of the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created after the U.S. Civil War to provide aid to former slaves and launch institutional reform in the South. We use new historical records and an event study approach to estimate impacts of the Bureau on political economy in the South. In the decade immediately after the war, counties with Bureau field offices had reduced vote shares for Democrats, the major political party that previously championed slavery and opposed Black civil rights during Reconstruction. In the longer-run, we find evidence of backlash in the form of higher Democratic vote shares and increases in several forms of racial violence, including lynchings and attacks against Black schools. This backlash extends through the twentieth century, when we find that counties that once had a Bureau field office have higher rates of second-wave and third-wave Ku Klux Klan activity and lower rates of intergenerational economic mobility. Overall, our results suggest that the initial impacts of the Freedmen’s Bureau stimulated countervailing responses by White majorities who sought to offset social progress of Black Americans.
Event Details
Date: October 10, 2024
Time: 3:30 – 5:00 PM
Location: Iona 533, 6000 Iona Dr, Vancouver, BC
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Eric Chyn is an applied microeconomist whose research covers a range of topics in labor and public economics. Much of his research focuses on understanding the effects of government programs on the long-run outcomes of children. His research has been published in the leading academic journals in economics, such as the American Economic Review and the Journal of Political Economy, and covered by national media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. His dissertation work was awarded the Dorothy S. Thomas Award from the Population Association of America (PAA) and the Dissertation Prize from the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2016.