Marianne H. Wanamaker

• University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Large and persistent racial disparities in land-based wealth were an important legacy of the Reconstruction era. To assess how these disparities were transmitted intergenerationally, we build a dataset to observe Black households’ landholdings in 1880 alongside a sample of White households. We then link sons from all households to the 1900 census r...

We document the intergenerational mobility of Black and White American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twentieth century. We find large disparities in mobility, with White children having far better cha...

Racially or ethnically targeted events may have adverse health implications for members of the group not directly targeted, a phenomenon known as peripheral trauma. Recent evidence suggests that mass incarceration, police brutality, and immigration actions all have such effects, as did medical exploitation by the US government during the Tuskegee S...

For 40 years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male passively monitored hundreds of adult black men with syphilis despite the availability of effective treatment. The study's methods have become synonymous with exploitation and mistreatment by the medical profession. To identify the study's effects on the behavior and health of...

Competition in the Promised Land. By Leah Platt Boustan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. 216. $23.95, hardcover. - Volume 77 Issue 4 - Marianne Wanamaker

This article uses data on relative incomes to measure the economic convergence (or lack thereof) of African American men over time, and reviews current research in economic history on the struggle for economic equality for African American men in the United States since the end of the Civil War in 1865. The contents of this paper were originally pr...

We estimate returns to school resources in the Jim Crow era, as measured by young males' 1940 wage earnings, occupational status, and cognitive aptitude scores. Results point to a 16 cent annual return on each $1 invested in public schools. To the question of whether some school inputs mattered more than others, we find comparable 25-32 cent return...

Competing explanations for the long-standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences. Using new data on local school quality, we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the South despite entrenched racial d...

We construct datasets of linked census records to study internal migrants' selection and destination choices during the first decades of the “Great Migration” (1910–1930). We study both whites and blacks and intra- and inter-regional migration. While there is some evidence of positive selection, the degree of selection was small and participation i...

Gains in 20th century real wages and reductions in the black- white wage gap have been linked to the midcentury ascent of school quality. With a new data set uniquely appropriate to identifying the impact of female voter enfranchisement on education spending, we attribute up to one- third of the 1920-40 rise in public school expenditures to the Nin...

Using data from Pakistan, we study the effect of family wealth on the utilization of child labor. We find evidence of a positive relationship between land wealth and child labor only for children in the upper quantiles of the distribution. We hypothesize that the so-called “wealth paradox” in child labor is driven by parental preferences.

In periods of high energy demand, utilities frequently issue “emergency” appeals for conservation over peak hours to reduce brownout risk. We estimate the impact of such appeals using high-frequency data on actual and forecasted electricity generation, pollutant emission measures, and real-time prices. Our results suggest a perverse impact; while t...

Theories of the demographic transition often center on the rising price of children. A model of fertility derived from household production in the antebellum United States contains both own children and slaves as inputs. Changes in slaveholdings beget changes in the marginal product of the slaveowners’ own children and, hence, their price. I use pa...

The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manuscripts to address three interconnected questions: To what extent was there selection into migratio...

Long-run labor market inequities are frequently attributed to disparities in primary and secondary school quality, and philanthropists often resort to targeted and tightly conditioned gifts to address these quality disparities. We match data on the Rosenwald Schools Program, an early 20th century initiative aimed at the Southern black–white school...

Economists frequently hypothesize that industrialization contributed to the United States’ nineteenth-century fertility decline. I exploit the circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1881 and 1900 to show that the establishment of textile mills coincided with a 6–10 percent fertility reduction. Migrating households are...

Economists have frequently hypothesized that industrialization and its correlates played a major role in fertility decline in the United States after 1850. I exploit the unique circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1880 and 1900 to show that fertility rates were negatively impacted by the arrival of textile mills. Us...

Economists have frequently hypothesized that industrialization and its correlates played a major role in inducing fertility decline in the United States after 1850. There are several competing explanations for the precise mechanism, including increases in the costs of raising children, increased urbanization, increases in the returns to human capit...

We assemble a new dataset that links census records for more than 5,000 African American males from 1910 to 1930, the first two decades of the "Great Migration" from the South. We use the new dataset to engage major themes in research on the Great Migration. We find that literacy in 1910 is weakly correlated with subsequent inter-regional migration...