Cotton suitability and upward mobility. These figures show binned scatterplots of the residualized CZ–level link between cotton suitability and absolute upward mobility across CZs with no (0) slaves reported in the 1860 census (panel a) and across CZs with at least one slave reported in the census (panel b). Each group of CZs is collapsed into 10 bins based on the residualized average suitability for cultivating cotton after absorbing state fixed effects, and for each bin, the mean level of residual absolute upward mobility is depicted. The sample means are added back to the residuals of each variable prior to binning and plotting. Also shown are fitted OLS regressions based on the underlying (ungrouped) CZ–level data