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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
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.
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- © The Economic History Association 2020
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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