Working Papers
Newer versions of working papers likely exist. If you are curious about the state of a current paper, please do not hesitate to
get in touch with me.
American Mobility and the Expansion of Public Education
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (pdf, 566KB) Slides (pdf, 3,355KB)
Educational institutions and intergenerational mobility are closely related with access to
schools a major determinant of a child's future success. This paper offers new insight into this
relationship with a study of mobility during the United States' expansion of public schools
in the early twentieth century. A new intergenerational dataset is used to establish a sharp
decline in income mobility over the twentieth century and a negative correlation between public
school expansion and mobility. Educational attainment estimates reveal that this negative
relationship was a product of wealthy families being more responsive to improving school
access than poor families.
Good Schools Make Good Neighbors: Human Capital Spillovers in Early-20th Century Agriculture
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (pdf, 658KB) Slides (pdf, 4,173KB)
Education has an important but often underappreciated role in agricultural productivity. I present evidence from the Midwest at the start of the twentieth century
showing that the emerging public schools were helping farmers successfully adapt to a
variety of agricultural innovations. I construct a unique dataset of farmers containing
detailed geographical information and use it to estimate both the private returns to
schooling and human capital spillovers across neighboring farms. The results indicate
that public schools contributed substantially to agricultural productivity at the turn
of the century and that a large portion of this contribution came through spillovers.
These findings shed new light on the forces underlying public school expansion in the
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and the role of schools and
the agricultural sector in overall economic growth more generally.
Childhood Health and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Genetic Brothers in Arms
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (pdf, 1.06MB) Slides (pdf, 3,297KB)
Childhood health can have a significant impact on both the amount of schooling a child receives and the benefits from that schooling. As a consequence, a negative shock to childhood
health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual, not just through
lingering impacts on physical human capital but also the human capital acquired through formal
schooling. This paper traces the evolution of childhood health and educational attainment
through the first decades of the twentieth century in the United States and quantifies the relationship between childhood health, proxied by adult height, and educational attainment over
time and across cities. I construct a new dataset of brothers serving in World War II and use it to demonstrate that this correlation is present within families, with taller brothers receiving significantly
more education on average than their shorter siblings. The results suggest that childhood health
strongly in
fluenced educational attainment in the early twentieth century even after controlling
for household and environmental characteristics.
Gender and Intergenerational Mobility: Using Health Outcomes to Compare Intergenerational Mobility Across Gender and Over Time
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (pdf, 689KB) Slides (pdf, 2,022KB)
Changes in intergenerational mobility over time have been the focus of extensive research.
However, existing studies have been limited to studying only males and relying on intergenerational
correlations in outcome variables that often lack clear welfare implications. This paper
introduces a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility that relies on health
measures rather than occupational measures to assess the strength of the relationship between
the outcomes of parents and their children. It introduces a new intergenerational dataset spanning
seven decades that is constructed by linking individuals' death certificates to those of their
parents. Relying on death certificate data allows for linking both males and females to their
parents. Life span calculated from these death certi cates provides a measure of welfare that
has a consistent interpretation across time and genders. Intergenerational correlations in life
span serve as my measure of mobility. I find that a son's life span is strongly correlated with
his father's and that this correlation has strengthened over time. Daughter's life span shows
a similarly strong relationship with mother's life span that has remained relatively stable over
the past century. Differences in life span are shown to be correlated with occupational status and
occupational transitions from one generation to the next.
The Long Reach of Disease: The Effects of the 1919 Infuenza Pandemic on Family Structure and Resource Allocation
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (available June 2011) Slides (available June 2011)
The impacts of a negative health shock during childhood can have long term consequences for a person in terms of health,
human capital formation and labor market outcomes. However, the effects of the health shock are not necessarily limited
to the aflicted individual. By raising the costs of the child both in terms of health care and human capital investment, the
health shock impacts a family's resource allocation decisions. As a result, a significant negative health shock for one child
can influence the outcomes of his or her healthy siblings. This paper uses the 1919 influenza pandemic to assess the ways in
which a major negative health shock influences family planning and investment decisions. By linking educational and health
data from military records to census information on childhood households, I show that the influenza pandemic had significant
impacts on family structure and the levels of investment in not only those children born during the pandemic but also on their siblings.
Preliminary results suggest that couples were less likely to start a family during the pandemic and more likely to choose to have more
children if one of their children was born during the pandemic. Additionally, families reduced educational investments across
all of their children if one was born during the pandemic. These findings highlight the important role health shocks have in
decisions of family formation, family size and the division of resources within the family.
Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Mortality in the 20th Century: Evidence from the Carolinas (with Trevon Logan)
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (external link)
Racial and socioeconomic gaps in mortality persisted throughout the twentieth century. We know little, however, about how racial or
socioeconomic gaps in mortality were related to each other or how cause-specific mortality evolved over the twentieth century more
generally. Demographers have repeatedly documented serious data problems that limit our ability to analyze these issues. In an attempt
to overcome these problems, we link a random sample of death certificates taken at five year intervals from 1910 to 1975 to the
manuscript federal census files of the deceased's early in life and then to the death certificates of the deceased's parents. To our
knowledge, the data we construct is the first of its kind in linking parent and child death certificate information with the additional
information from the census files. We show that our research design allows us to construct a panel data set that allows us to look at
mortality (both general and cause-specific) over time and for specific cohorts. This paper presents preliminary evidence from our pilot
study of death certificates from the Carolinas in the twentieth century, documenting racial and occupational differences in mortality over
the twentieth century. We outline several avenues of future research to be investigated with this data.
Maps and Graphs for the Health and Education Project
Map of average educational attainment by county for WWII enlistees (jpg)
Map of average height by county for WWII enlistees (jpg)
Graph of average height and educational attainment by cohort for WWII enlistees (jpg)
Graph of average height and educational attainment by cohort for WWII enlistees by geographical region (jpg)
Maps for the Human Capital Spillovers Project
Distribution of annual earnings: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold (pdf, ~100KB each)
Distribution of total schooling with school locations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold (pdf, ~100KB each)
Distribution of high school and college attainment with school locations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold (pdf, ~100KB each)
Distribution of church affiliations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold (pdf, ~100KB each)
Distribution of parents' place of birth: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold (pdf, ~100KB each)
Data and Code
Annual reports of county superintendents of schools, Iowa, 1900
The following data are transcribed from the microfilms of the original report files. To date, I have transcribed the complete records for
thirteen counties. If you are interested in data for other counties, I can provide pdf's of the originial report pages.
Variable List (pdf)
Transcribed Data (excel file, 651KB)
Mapping files for the human capital spillovers in agriculture project
Complete ArcMap and data files (zip file, 83MB)
The following scripts determine a farmer's adjacent neighbors and calculate summary statistics regarding those neighbors. The scripts
are based on the QueryAll script written by Shan Chen.
Script to calculate neighbor characteristics (VBscript file, 26KB)
Script to calculate neighbor characteristics within and outside of social networks (VBScript file, 33KB)
City level mortality and morbidity statistics by disease, averages for 1918-1924 and reported figures for 1925
The file below contains data on the number of cases and deaths from various diseases between 1918 and 1925 for cities with a population of over 100,000 in 1925. The data are transcribed from tables in volume 41, issue 38 of the Public Health Reports published by the Department of Public Health. I will post similar information for all cities with populations between 10,000 and 100,000 once I have checked the data for errors.
City level morbidity and mortality data, 1918-1925 (Excel file, 52KB)
Intergenerational data for the mobility and public school expansion project
I am still working to clean up and annotate the raw data and stata files. If you have any questions about these data, feel free to email me.
