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Long-Run Impacts of Agricultural Shocks on Educational Attainment: Evidence from the Boll Weevil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2020

Richard B. Baker ,
John Blanchette  and
Katherine Eriksson
Richard B. Baker
Affiliation:
Richard B. Baker is Assistant Professor of Economics, The College of New Jersey, School of Business, PO Box 7718, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, NJ08628–0718. E-mail: bakerr@tcnj.edu
John Blanchette
Affiliation:
John Blanchette is Ph.D. candidate in Economics, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA95616-8617. E-mail: jblanchette@ucdavis.edu
Katherine Eriksson
Affiliation:
Katherine Eriksson is Assistant Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA95616–8617; Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Research Affiliate at Laboratory for the Economics of Africa’s Past, University of Stellenbosch. E-mail: kaeriksson@ucdavis.edu.
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Abstract

The boll weevil spread across the South from 1892 to 1922 with devastating effect on cotton cultivation. The resulting shift away from this child labor–intensive crop lowered the opportunity cost of school attendance. We investigate the insect’s long-run effect on educational attainment using a sample of adults from the 1940 census linked back to their childhood census records. Both white and black children who were young (ages 4 to 9) when the weevil arrived saw increased educational attainment by 0.24 to 0.36 years. Our results demonstrate the potential for conflict between child labor in agriculture and educational attainment.

Type
Article
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , March 2020 , pp. 136 - 174
Copyright
© The Economic History Association 2020

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Footnotes

We are grateful to James Feigenbaum, Paul Rhode, and Marianne H. Wanamaker for providing feedback on earlier versions of this paper. We thank workshop participants at the University of California Davis, The College of New Jersey, the 2018 World Economic History Congress, and North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society for their helpful comments and suggestions. We owe special thanks to Celeste K. Carruthers and Marianne H. Wanamaker for generously sharing with us their county-level administrative data on schools.

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