Simone Wegge City University of New York

Simone A. Wegge is Assistant Professor of Economics (with tenure) on the faculties of the College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the current chair of the Columbia University Seminar in Economic History. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and her graduate degrees from Northwestern University. Joel Mokyr directed her dissertation, "Migration Decisions in Mid-19th Century Germany," with additional guidance from Joseph Altonji, Joseph Ferrie, and Alan Taylor. Recently her dissertation won the 2002 International Economic History Association award for the "Modern, Before World War I" category. Grants from the German Marshall Fund, the Arthur Cole Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service, as well as from her home institutions have supported Wegge's research.

Wegge's research program is centered on improving the understanding of migration, which - along with capital accumulation, education, technological change, and institutions - is an important component of ongoing work in economics related to long-term economic growth. Population movements are directly connected to economic performance, because the performance is enhanced when capital and labor move in response to higher rates of return. Historically, such performance enhancing allocations of labor typically involved migration.

As such, the makeup of a region's labor force and the manner in which it changes through both immigration and emigration have implications for the growth or stagnation of an economy. Decisions made by individuals at the micro level may have consequences for macroeconomic performance. Do some economies do better over the long run by accepting migrants? Do certain characteristics of migrants, even a small number of migrants, play a particular role in enhancing an economy’s performance? These are all questions economic historians can shed light on. The groundwork, however, begins at the micro level, because individuals and families, not nations or governments, make decisions to move. By assessing the emigrant population together with the populations in the homeland and at the destination, one is able to compare immigrants to the native-born and emigrants to those who remain at home.

Wegge's research focuses on this latter issue. More specifically, she considers who emigrated, why they may have left, and what sorts of communities they left. Her work focuses on mid-nineteenth century migration from the German principality of Hesse-Cassel and links emigration data with economic data from the migrants’ village. A central issue involves identifying the socioeconomic factors in the homeland and in the destination countries that influenced migrants. A focus on the migrants' homeland is relevant because most nineteenth-century migrants made their decisions to leave while physically in their homelands.

To study such issues one needs micro data of a specific quality and quantity. Data on individual migrants from anywhere and in any historical period, however, rarely exist. U.S. historians, for example, have used American data (ship passenger lists) to understand historical migration to the United States. Partly, this arises because only a few places in Europe still have emigration lists from which one can put together micro data on emigrants.

Wegge has constructed a unique data set consisting of approximately 50,000 individual migrants from the State Archive of Hesse in Marburg, Germany. These micro-level data are of a quality and quantity not commonly achieved in migration studies of any locale or historical period. They concern migrants who stem from the German principality of Hesse-Cassel, who left between 1832 and 1857 and mostly settled permanently in the United States. Wegge has linked the data on migrants to other data describing the socioeconomic characteristics of the over one thousand home villages they left. A recent article in the 2003 volume of Research in Economic History discusses the various data sets she has gathered to study the micro behavior of Hessian emigrants in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Over fifty million people emigrated from Europe between 1815 and 1930, but only a small fraction of these emigrants have been studied using data collected in their homelands.

The Hessian emigrant data are promising for studying many issues in the migration literature, particularly migration behavior and the causes of emigration. Much social science research on migration lacks such detailed information on migrants' economic status at the time of migration or the population migrants originate from. Wegge's work on migration thus represents one of the few studies that capture information on both emigrants and stayers.

A theme that permeates much of Wegge’s research on European migrants is that they were different from those who remained at home, a matter that bears directly on issues of self-selection. In various ways they did not resemble a sample randomly chosen from the population from which they came. This is a result common to several of her papers and emphasizes that migrants are special in some way. The migration literature within economics, on the other hand, typically overlooks this empirical finding and concentrates instead on assimilation, or how immigrants compare to the native-born. Economists thus disregard half of the self-selection equation: how migrants compare to those who stay home. Clarifying the self-selection mechanisms in the homeland as well as at the destination, however, is important because it not only improves our knowledge of who migrates but also provides insight into what their motivations are and which economic factors matter in the decision to migrate.

One of Wegge's papers, published recently in the European Review of Economic History, addresses the occupational characteristics of emigrants who left the principality of Hesse-Cassel. In particular, self-selection patterns by occupation are important because they suggest economic reasons related to labor markets that may have been relevant to those who migrated. By comparing over 10,000 German emigrants to those who stayed home, she finds that artisans were over-represented and farmers and laborers both under-represented. The emigrant population was positively self-selected in terms of skills, but negatively self-selected in terms of financial wealth.

A working paper [9] further extends the comparison of emigrants and stayers along the dimension of wealth. Wegge argues that wealth mattered in a crucial way, since the poorest residents of a village stayed home, most likely because they lacked the financial resources to pay for a move. Wealth mattered, however, only up to a point, because few of the most prosperous members of a village left. The results also suggest that the direct costs of migration (out of pocket costs) drive an important degree of the selection bias.

A third paper focuses on personal networks and reiterates the theme that migrants are self-selected (Journal of Economic History 1998). This research also delves into deeper reasons beyond labor market pressures that can lead to an improved understanding of why certain people went and most stayed home. In particular, her work deals specifically with chain migration, the presence of personal networks that people used to accomplish their migration goals. Many migrants knew someone who had already migrated, which could be crucial to the decision to move: a previous migrant could assist current migrants by providing information about the destination and by covering some costs and adjustments of migration and resettlement. Wegge's analysis in this area represents one of the few existing social science studies to isolate the connections between large numbers of successive groups of emigrants. The use of familial networks increased dramatically over time among emigrants from the principality of Hesse-Cassel. In 1840, for instance, 7% of all emigrants were related to previous emigrants from the same home community. With each passing year, more emigrants were related to previous ones, such that in 1848 this figure was 22%, in 1853 it had risen to 27%, and by 1857 to 43%. By 1857 a large proportion of moves thus consisted of migrants leaving the same villages their relatives had left in the 1840s and early 1850s. By this time the number of migrants living in the United States from source countries like German principalities had increased, making it more likely that potential migrants in German areas knew someone in the United States they could turn to.

A further contribution of this work on networks is to provide a conservative and realistic measure of how important a familial relationship with a past emigrant was in deciding to move. The size of the familial network is measured at the community level. This work thus improves upon many previous studies of chain migration that have measured chain migration at a county or regional level and hence exaggerated the effect of previous migrants on the decisions of later migrants. Even by using a conservative measure of chain migration effects, Wegge finds that relative to other economic factors, knowing someone was one of the most important factors driving these historical emigration rates. She is extending her study on migration networks and chain migration in a working paper by examining the sorts of groups chain migrants traveled in and the long-term familial strategies families used to achieve their migration goals [10].

In a fifth paper, research on property inheritance institutions highlights particular institutional conditions migrants faced in their homelands and how these affected selectivity (Explorations in Economic History 1999). Like the project on personal networks, Wegge's work on property institutions investigates the nature of the migration decision, which factors mattered and why. Inheritance in the middle of Germany was inherently a local condition because it differed from village to village. This work shows that individuals were more likely to leave from villages that used an impartible inheritance tradition rather than a partible tradition. Those leaving from villages where land was not divided were also younger than those leaving from communities that used a partible inheritance tradition. A number of effects caused this latter finding: children not destined to inherit land often knew so early on and could consider other options like migration; in some non-partible villages the inheriting offspring would make small lump sum payments to his or her siblings, effectively providing financing for a migration. These various local economic conditions played an important role in determining who left and who stayed home.

In other research, published in Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, Wegge has further explored migrant characteristics by analyzing the particular distinctiveness of female migrants in an era when women were less likely to emigrate than men. A main finding is that Hessian women tended to travel with family. Even among those who traveled alone, almost half of them were travelling as part of a migration network. Thus the vast majority of women, 79 per cent, were tied to their families. Almost all women, 97.5 per cent, went to the United States, and were more likely to do so than men. The opportunity to marry was likely an important motive and was easier in the U.S. than in Hesse-Cassel or in other areas of Germany where one had to prove the economic viability of a household. Economic incentives were not the only motivation, as documentation also exists in a few cases of women migrating to escape from abuse at home. A number of the women emigrating were also quite well off, particularly many widows. The majority, however, took very little in financial assets with them, less than what men took on average. The Hesse-Cassel experience shows that women at all stages of the lifecycle emigrated; their decision to move was related to their respective ages, marital status, and wealth. The long-distance movement of women, moreover, is connected to other relevant themes concerning women in social history, such as economic opportunity, the right to property, and the changing nature and prospect of marriage and family.

Papers on networks, property institutions and women migrants contribute to the literature by describing the complicated nature of the migrant decision. A different line of Wegge's research describes the theoretical dynamics of the migration decision by presenting definitions for “push” and “pull” migration [8]. The lack of precise definitions has contributed to the misuse of these expressions. Explaining push and pull migration depends on the role of new information and how it affects the expected utility of potential migrants. As such, both push and pull factors can motivate an individual to move. The interpretation of push and pull in this work improves the understanding of the timing of migration decisions, as well as the factors that influence them. Empirical estimations of push-pull migration incorporate the proposed definitions as well as important variables at the micro level. From the statistical results, Wegge concludes that the Hessian emigration in the 1840s and 1850s was predominantly push in nature. In contrast, previous work by other economic historians on push and pull factors has concentrated on post-1870 immigration to the US, which has been described as heavily influenced by pull factors.

Wegge's work on European emigration continues to progress in a number of directions. Future work on European emigration will involve assessing the long-term economic impact of high emigration rates on the Hesse-Cassel economy. This project will examine whether the departure of numerous skilled artisans from this region in the 1840s and 1850s played a detrimental role in the long run. A second project involves assessing whether subsequent Hessian migrant settlement patterns in the United States (not observable in Hessian data) were influenced by whether migrants were part of a family network or not. The goal of this latter project is to assess the effect of networks on migrant assimilation and wealth accumulation.

Wegge is also working on a joint project with Carolyn Tuttle (Lake Forest College) to compare the use of child labor during the industrial revolution in Britain, Belgium and Germany [11]. Various factory and manufacturing data are used to explore the incidence and causes of child labor for the three different European countries during their respective transitions from agrarian towards more industrialized economies. In this paper they consider the development in each country of labor laws limiting the use of children in factories and mines. Tuttle and Wegge also examine the evolution of educational reforms and the rise of mass schooling to assess how they differentially affected the supply of children to the labor market and the nature of a child's workday within the three European regions. Over time, the incidence of child labor fell in all three countries. Nevertheless, it does not appear that early adoption of child labor laws made much difference in the employment of child labor during the industrialization period. This work, while contributing to the literature on historical labor markets and industrialization in its assessment of the nature and incidence of child labor across three different industrializing economies, also improves the understanding of the connection between child labor and education and their regulation.

References:
1. Wegge, Simone A. “Occupational Self-selection of Nineteenth-Century German Emigrants: Evidence from the Principality of Hesse-Cassel.” European Review of Economic History, 6 (3): 365-394, 2002.

2. Wegge, Simone A. “Inheritance Systems: Historical Overview,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

3. Wegge, Simone A. “The Hesse-Cassel Emigrants: A New Sample of Transatlantic Emigrants Linked to Their Origins,” Research in Economic History, 21: 357-405, 2001.

4. Wegge, Simone A. To Part or Not to Part: Emigration and Inheritance Institutions in Mid-19th Century Germany," Explorations in Economic History, 36 (1): 30-55, 1999.

5. Wegge, Simone A. "Chain Migration and Information Networks: Evidence From Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel," The Journal of Economic History, 58 (4): 957-986, 1998.

6. Wegge, Simone A. "A Historical Perspective on Female Migrants.” In Sharpe, Pam (ed.), Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, a monograph in the Routledge Research in Gender and History series. London: Routledge, 2001, Chapter 9, pp. 163-189.

7. Wegge, Simone A. "Migration Decisions in Mid-19th Century Germany," Journal of Economic History, 58 (2): 532-535, 1998.

8. Wegge, Simone A. “Push and Pull Migration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, working paper.

9. Wegge, Simone A. “Do migrant origins matter? Migrants vs. Non-Migrants: Self-Selection of Migrants Out of the Home Population,” working paper.

10. Wegge, Simone A. "Network Strategies of Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel Emigrants,” working paper.

11. Wegge, Simone A. (joint with Carolyn Tuttle). "The Role of Child Labor in Industrialization," working paper.