IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/34958.html

The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States

Author

Listed:
  • Taylor Jaworski
  • Erik O. Kimbrough

Abstract

How durable are regional cultures within the United States? We study the long-run persistence of first-name distributions at the county level between 1850 and 1930. We recover distinct cultural groups through an unsupervised clustering algorithm and show that these groups match well-known patterns of settlement and are persistent over time. The most important divide is between the North and the South, but finer partitions reveal historically interpretable subregions, including New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the upland South, and the Deep South. Our results have implications for theories that link cultural homogeneity and the development of pluralistic institutions as well as theories of path dependence in development.

Suggested Citation

  • Taylor Jaworski & Erik O. Kimbrough, 2026. "The Emergence of Regional Cultures in the United States," NBER Working Papers 34958, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34958
    Note: DAE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w34958.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Carlos Sanz, 2026. "Social Sorting and Political Cleavages: Evidence from 2.5 Million Electoral Candidates," NBER Working Papers 35820, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • N9 - Economic History - - Regional and Urban History
    • R10 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34958. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.