Democratizing Opportunity: The Effects of the U.S. High School Movement (with Ezra Karger and Peter Nencka)

The U.S. high school movement transformed economic opportunities for young adults. We present a new complete panel of high schools in over 25,000 towns and cities across the United States. We use this data to show that high school access caused sharp increases in school attendance rates for high school-aged students but not younger children. Linking children to their adult labor market outcomes, we show that high school access boosted labor supply, increased job quality, and reduced the probability of marriage by age 28, with effects concentrated among women, who outnumbered men as high school graduates until the 1940s. We then use structured biographies to show that high school availability increased the probability that a child would become eminent, democratizing access to the most prestigious positions in science, politics, and business.

We have presented this project at the NBER Summer Institute, the Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, the Mountain West Economic History Conference, and the Notre Dame Economics of Education Workshop as well as at Georgetown University, Marquette University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Wellesley College, and the University of Chicago. 

How Much Do Cash Transfers Compensate Children for a Father’s Injury or Death? (with Michael McKelligott)

Workers’ compensation was the first widespread social insurance program in the United States (Fishback & Kantor, 2000), but its long-run effects on injured workers and their families are not well understood. We examine this by leveraging quasi-random variation in both mining accidents and access to workers’ compensation for families in the early-20th-century United States. Matching detailed individual-level data on coal mining accidents with linked Census data, we study how access to workers’ compensation payments may have narrowed income and education gaps between children whose father died in a mining accident and similar children whose father survived. To illuminate possible mechanisms, we also examine effects of access to workers’ compensation on deceased miners’ surviving spouses.

I have presented this project at the Midwest Economic Association, the University of Chicago Public/Labor Lunch, the Virtual Economic History Workshop, and the BYU Economics Graduate Student Conference.

Substitutability at Home: Long-Run Effects of Access to Infant Formula on Maternal Labor Supply