1 Mobility on the Agricultural Ladder and Intergenerational Wealth Transfers in U.S. Agriculture, 1880-1920” 1 Lee J. Alston UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AND NBER and Joseph P. Ferrie NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY AND NBER I. Introduction For much of U.S. economic history, the place most closely associated with both home and work was the farm. Until the 1920 census, the majority of Americans lived in rural places, and most of them were in one way or another tied to the agricultural economy. Daily life was shaped in ways both large and small by the demands of season, soil, and scale. We take advantage of a unique source – the 10,000 surviving manuscript schedules from the 1920 U.S. Census of Agriculture – to explore how place shaped the tenure mobility of farmers. Labor economists are familiar with an age earnings profile. In agriculture the analogue is the agricultural ladder where workers ascend (or descend) from farm laborer (on or off the family farm); to sharecropper (in the South); to tenant (share or fixed rent), and for some to owner. 2 Social and economic status typically increases with each step on the ladder. For example, farm wage workers and sharecroppers generally earned income similar to unskilled workers in manufacturing, whereas the income of a tenant was akin to the earnings of skilled workers. The income of owners was more variable and included capital gains or losses so their status was closer to that of a small business proprietor. Farms are also similar to small businesses in that farm owners frequently bequeathed their farms to their sons and daughters. In some of our farming regions, inheritance plays a great role in the intergenerational transfer of wealth. The transfer of farms to heirs also represented a large capital movement to urban to areas because many heirs migrated to cities with their share of the 1 For comments in the formative stage of this paper we thank Herb Emery. We received helpful comments from Nancy Virts, and participants at presentations at the Economic History Association Annual Meeting and the Northwestern University Economic History Workshop. For research assistance we thank Jirapa Inthisang, Kara Norlin and Clayton Reck. The data collection was made possible by NSF Grant SES-0112093. 2 Richard Ely, President of the American Economic Association, used the term “agricultural ladder” in an address in 1916. W.J. Spillman is credited with popularizing the term in an American Economic Review article in 1919 (Spillman 1919).