High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity (with Ezra Karger and Peter Nencka)

Between 1850 and 1910, the share of young Americans living in towns with high schools increased from 17% to 46%—the fastest expansion of school access in U.S. history. Using new data on every high school in the United States, we show that this expansion transformed economic opportunities for many young adults but widened class and racial inequalities. We find sharp increases in school attendance rates for high school-aged children in towns that opened a high school relative to children in nearby towns without one. Linking children to adult outcomes, we show that high schools increased women’s labor force participation and job quality, while reducing the probability of early marriage and childbearing. Increased access to high school accounts for a third of the increase in women’s labor force participation between 1870 and 1930. High schools had the largest effects on children from already-wealthy families, and did not, on average, benefit Black children. While the high school movement substantially narrowed gender gaps in labor market outcomes, it also widened existing race- and class-based disparities.

We have presented this paper at the NBER Development of the American Economy 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, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. 

The Long-Run Effects of Access to Social Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Workers' Compensation (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 (previously titled "How Much Do Cash Transfers Compensate Children for a Father’s Injury or Death?") at the BYU Economics Graduate Student Conference, the Mountain West Economic History Conference, the Midwest Economic Association, the Northwestern University Economic History Lunch, the University of Chicago Public/Labor Lunch, and the Virtual Economic History Workshop.

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