Joseph P. Ferrie

Professor of Economics
Faculty Associate, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University
Ph.D., Economics, University of Chicago, 1992
ferrie@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Ferrie specializes in economic history, specifically the construction of longitudinal data sets from historical sources, and the political economy of welfare programs in the southern United States. His research involves the construction of large, micro-level longitudinal data sets from historical sources (census manuscripts, passenger ship records, tax lists, city directories) and the analysis of the patterns of geographic, occupational, and financial mobility in these data.

Current Projects

19th Century Economic Mobility of Immigrants. In his 1999 book, ‘Yankeys Now’: Immigrants in the Antebellum U.S., 1840-60 (Oxford University Press), Ferrie studied the economic mobility of European immigrants in the United States prior to the Civil War. He found extensive geographic and occupational mobility — and rapid rates of wealth accumulation — contradicting long-held views of these immigrants’ experience. He is in the process of extending this research with a new sample of 50,000 European immigrants who arrived before 1890 and have been located in census manuscripts and passenger ship arrival records.

Socioeconomic Correlates of Mortality. Ferrie is examining a wide range of socioeconomic correlates of mortality in the 19th century. He is looking at the extent to which mortality rates increased as urbanization and industrialization proceeded, using evidence on mortality by location, occupation, family socioeconomic status, age and cause of death. For a large set of late 19th century cities, he is examining the impact of access to water and sewer systems on mortality.

Geographic and Economic Mobility, 1850-2000. In his newest project, using data on more than 75,000 native-born males linked across U.S. population censuses separated by up to 30 years, Ferrie is assessing long-run changes in the links between geographic, occupational and financial mobility. This work will appear in a new book Moving Through Time (Cambridge University Press), scheduled to be published in 2007. As part of this work, he is examining the economic progress of blacks in the first decades after their emancipation, and changes in intergenerational mobility in the U.S. over the last 150 years. In collaboration with several co-authors, he is assessing the historical and contemporary differences in mobility between the U.S. and both Britain and France.

Selected Publications

Books

Ferrie, Joseph. 1999. ‘Yankeys Now’: European Immigrants in the Antebellum U.S., 1840-60. Oxford University Press.

Ferrie, Joseph, and Lee J. Alston. 1999. Southern Paternalism and the Rise of the Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the U.S. South, 1865-1965. Cambridge University Press.

Ferrie, Joseph. Forthcoming 2007. Moving Through Time: U.S. Occupational, Geographic, and Financial Mobility Across and Within Generations, 1850-2000. Cambridge University Press.

Articles in Scholarly Journals

Ferrie, J., and L. Alston. Forthcoming 2005. Time on the ladder: Career mobility in American agriculture, 1890-1937. Journal of Economic History 66.

Ferrie, J., Patricia M. Altham. Forthcoming 2005. Comparing contingency tables. Historical Methods.

Ferrie, J. 2005. The end of American Exceptionalism? Mobility in the U.S. since 1850. Journal of Economic Perspectives 19:199-215.

Ferrie, J., and J. Currie. 2000. The law and labor strife in the United States, 1881-1894. Journal of Economic History 60:1-25.