Schools and Skills in Developing Countries: Education Policies and Socioeconomic Outcomes

By Paul Glewwe

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

This paper reviews recent research on the determinants of educational outcomes, and the impact of those outcomes on other socioeconomic phenomena. It addresses three questions: 1) What school policies are most cost-effective in producing students with par...

Estimating the Effects of Milk Inspections on Infant and Child Mortality, 1880−1910

By D. Mark Anderson, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Michael McKelligott, and Daniel I. Rees

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the mid-nineteenth century, the urban milk supply in the United States was regularly skimmed or diluted with water, reducing its nutritional value. At the urging of public health experts, cities across the country hired milk inspectors, who were tasked...

Segregation and the Initial Provision of Water in the United States

By Brian Beach, John Parman, and Martin Saavedra

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

US cities invested heavily in water and sewer infrastructure throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These investments improved public health and quality of life by helping US cities control typhoid fever and other waterborne disease...

1918 Every Year: Racial Inequality in Infectious Mortality, 1906−1942

By James J. Feigenbaum, Lauren Hoehn-Velasco, Christopher Muller, and Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the first half of the twentieth century, racial inequality in the rate of death from infectious disease was immense. In every year from 1906 to 1920, Black Americans in cities died from infectious diseases at a rate higher than that of urban White Amer...

Masks and Trolleys in San Francisco during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

By François R. Velde

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I analyze daily data on deaths and on mobility (ridership of electric railways) in the city of San Francisco in 1918−1919, using a model that combines a standard epidemiological component, agents who choose economic activity taking infection risk into a...

Boomtowns: Local Shocks and Inequality in 1920s California

By Sarah Quincy and Rowena Gray

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

As the United States economy grew in the 1920s, both wealth and income inequality rose as well. California land values were especially volatile as a variety of shocks buffeted the state. This paper summarizes how these local booms affected housing inequal...

Immigration Shocks and Marriage Market Sorting

By Katherine Eriksson, Addison Lake, and Gregory T. Niemesh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Recent work shows a puzzle in the early twentieth century United States: as intergenerational mobility decreased, assortative mating increased. We argue that these two facts are causally related by using a shock to intergenerational mobility caused by fal...

Transportation Revolution: The Car in the 1920s

By Shari Eli, Joshua K. Hausman, and Paul W. Rhode

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In 1919, there were 6 cars for every 100 people in the United States; in 1929, there were 19. The diffusion of the car transformed daily life and had large economic effects. Data on car registrations at the state level help us to understand the correlates...

Media Access and Consumption in the Civil Rights Era

By Tianyi Wang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper uses the 1960 census and contemporary individual survey data to document the media landscape during the American civil rights movement. I find that southern Black households' TV ownership was much lower than those of other groups in the nation....

On the Impact of Federal Housing Policies on Racial Inequality

By Omer Ali

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using data on the value of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance between 1935 and 1939, I estimate the effect of the agency's program on racial disparities in home ownership and home values. The distance between an FHA office and countie...

Sundown Towns and Racial Exclusion: The Southern White Diaspora and the "Great Retreat"

By Samuel Bazzi, Andreas Ferrara, Martin Fiszbein, Thomas Pearson, and Patrick A. Testa

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper studies the rise of sundown towns—places where Blacks and other minorities were excluded after dark—outside the South after 1890. We provide a new dataset on the timing of sundown town establishment using full count census records. Using a ...

Who Talks to Whom? Intra- and Interdisciplinary Communication of Economics Journals

By Rik Pieters and Hans Baumgartner

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

Citation patterns between 42 journals in economics from 1995 to 1997 are examined, plus between economics and anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology and five business disciplines. Building on social network theory, we identify a hierarchic...

Discrimination, Segregation, Integration, and Expropriation

By Geoffrey Fain Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I look at simple models of segregation and integration in a regional economy using a standard Cobb-Douglas production function and show that White capital does better in integration and White labor does better in segregation. I suggest that White capital ...

The Trade Reform Wave of 1985−1995

By Douglas A. Irwin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late...

The Dismantling of Capital Controls after Bretton Woods and Latin American Productivity

By Diana Van Patten

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The recent economic history of global integration has been characterized by a dismantling of capital controls and increased foreign direct investment (FDI). This paper explores the role of impediments to international capital mobility, foreign direct inve...

Migration on the Rise, a Paradigm in Decline: The Last Half-Century of Global Mobility

By Michael A. Clemens

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The past several decades have witnessed a rebirth of global labor mobility. Workers are moving between countries at rates not seen since before World War I. During the same period, economists' study of international migration has been framed by a particul...

Social Distancing, Stimulus Payments, and Domestic Violence: Evidence from the US during COVID-19

By Bilge Erten, Pinar Keskin, and Silvia Prina

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We examine the effects of social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic on the reporting of domestic violence to the police in the United States. Using daily domestic violence calls from 31 police departments from January to September 2020 (compa...

Public School Access or Stay-at-Home Partner: Factors Mitigating the Adverse Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Academic Parents

By Tatyana Deryugina, Olga Shurchkov, and Jenna Stearns

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic created unexpected and prolonged disruptions to childcare access. Using survey evidence on time use by academic researchers before and after the pandemic, we analyze the extent to which greater access to either school-based or partne...

Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in Developing Countries

By Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, Kristina Manysheva, and Michèle Tertilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In many high-income economies, the COVID-19 recession has resulted in unprecedented declines in women's employment. We examine how the forces that underlie this observation play out in developing countries. A force affecting high- and low-income countries...

Is Remote Sensing Data Useful for Studying the Association between Pandemic-Related Changes in Economic Activity and Intimate Partner Violence?

By Jorge M. Agüero, Erica Field, Ignacio Rodriguez Hurtado, and Javier Romero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using a survey conducted in Peru, we explore the use of remote sensing data in predicting income and intimate partner violence (IPV). We find that remote sensing measures correctly predict short-run changes in income during the COVID-19 pandemic. However,...