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Financial Inclusion, Human Capital, and Wealth Accumulation
This paper studies how access to financial services among a previously unbanked group affects human capital, labor market, and wealth outcomes. We use novel data from the Freedman’s Savings Bank—created following the American Civil War to serve free Blacks—employing an instrumental variables strategy exploiting the staggered rollout of bank branches. Families with accounts are more likely to have children in school, be literate, work, and have higher occupational income, business ownership, and real estate wealth. Placebo effects are not present using planned but unbuilt branches, or for Whites, suggesting significant positive effects of financial inclusion.
Journal Article
Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity
We build on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using US patent and census data to examine the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immigrant inventors were prevalent between 1880 and 1940 experienced more patenting and citations between 1940 and 2000. The contribution of immigrant inventors to US innovation was substantial. We also show that immigrant inventors were more productive than native born inventors; however, they received significantly lower levels of labor income. The immigrant inventor wage-gap cannot be explained by differentials in productivity.
Journal Article
Racial Disparities in Health Status and Access to Healthcare: The Continuation of Inequality in the United States Due to Structural Racism
During the Jim Crow era of 1877 to 1954, the federal government sponsored and supported the racially separate and unequal distribution of resources, including, but not limited to, education, housing, employment, and healthcare. On May 14, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that separate and unequal education violated the Constitution because separate is inherently unequal. Many believed that this ruling, the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, 1964, 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would put an end to the unequal treatment of African Americans in the United States. However, inequalities still exist today because the ruling and the laws did not change the structures of the United States. Specifically, structural racism prevents African Americans from obtaining equal access to resources such as wealth, employment, income, and healthcare, resulting in racial disparities in health. Because racial disparities between African Americans and Caucasians are the most studied in the United States, this article will focus exclusively on how structural racism continues and causes racial inequalities between African Americans and Caucasians in wealth, employment, income, and healthcare, which lead to racial disparities in access to healthcare and health status.
Journal Article
THE MEDIUM IS THE MEASURE: TECHNICAL CHANGE AND EMPLOYMENT, 1909–1949
New indicators, based on technology titles, are used to measure the impact of innovative activity on the U.S. labor market between 1909 and 1949. We find that positive technology shocks raised productivity, employment, vacancies, and labor turnover and lowered unemployment and business failures. Moreover, automotive and electrical innovations (quintessential general-purpose technologies) had a greater positive impact on employment than those in mechanical innovations. The overall results, compatible with the predictions of the real business cycle model, raise questions about the anemic recovery in employment after 1934 since the strong upsurge in technical change failed to be accompanied by vigorous job expansion.
Journal Article
Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth
This paper summarizes the book and assesses the reviews contained in the four contributed papers. Gregory Clark provides convincing arguments that extend the book's forecast that future technological change will be slower. Nicholas Crafts shows declining mortality and shorter work hours greatly increase welfare-augmented TFP growth during 1929-50. Benjamin Friedman points out that optimism about future technological change casts doubt on future employment growth, while technological pessimism implies employment optimism. Daron Acemoglu and co-authors emphasize the institutional environment that influences the timing and magnitude of innovation.
Journal Article
Information Networks and Collective Action
How do social interactions shape collective action, and how are they mediated by networked information technologies? We answer these questions studying the Temperance Crusade, a wave of anti-liquor protest activity spreading across 29 states between 1873 and 1874. Relying on exogenous variation in network links generated by railroad accidents, we provide causal evidence of social interactions driving the diffusion of the movement, mediated by rail and telegraph information about neighboring activity. Local newspaper coverage of the crusade was a key channel mediating these effects. Using an event-study methodology, we find strong complementarities between rail and telegraph networks in driving the movement’s spread.
Journal Article
\Momma's Got the Pill\: How Anthony Comstock and Griswold v. Connecticut Shaped US Childbearing
The 1960s ushered in a new era in US demographic history characterized by
significantly lower fertility rates and smaller family sizes. What catalyzed these
changes remains a matter of considerable debate. This paper exploits idiosyncratic
variation in the language of \"Comstock\" statutes, enacted in the late 1800s, to
quantify the role of the birth control pill in this transition. Almost 50 years after
the contraceptive pill appeared on the US market, this analysis provides new evidence
that it accelerated the post-1960 decline in marital fertility.
Journal Article
Leisure Jobs: Recreating Family and Social Life in Canadian Electric Utility Marketing, 1920–1970
This article contributes to scholarship on business history and gender in twentieth-century energy transitions. It examines Canadian electric power utility marketing plans and materials, newspaper and magazine accounts, and oral history interview records. Utilities initially sought to sell power as capital and labor rationality, mirroring industrial ideals of producing more with fewer resources. As those labor savings were realized, they increasingly sold power as a means to perform new organizational and emotional jobs of creating a more intimate, happier, and child-centered family life. In doing so, they redefined social life, from family-as-labor unit to family-as-leisure unit, while also redefining leisure-as-labor for women. Women in utility marketing materials, as observed in subsequent time-use studies, eventually saw fewer hours of housework and family care, although offset by increasing leisure jobs. Mobilizing social groups to advance an electrification agenda, utilities sold this new labor as an extension of energy service work in homes, public spaces, and leisure facilities.
Journal Article
“Mechanization Takes Command?”: Powered Machinery and Production Times in Late Nineteenth-Century American Manufacturing
During the nineteenth century, U.S. manufacturers shifted away from the “hand labor” mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to “machine labor,” which was increasingly concentrated in steam-powered factories. This transition fundamentally changed production tasks, jobs, and job requirements. This paper uses digitized data on these two production modes from an 1899 U.S. Commissioner of Labor report to estimate the frequency and impact of the use of inanimate power on production operation times. About half of production operations were mechanized; the use of inanimate power raised productivity, accounting for about one-quarter to one-third of the overall productivity advantage of machine labor. However, additional factors, such as the increased division of labor and adoption of high-volume production, also played quantitatively important roles in raising productivity in machine production versus by hand.
Journal Article