Three essays on U.S. economic history

This dissertation consists of three chapters on U.S. economic history. The first chapter examines the effect of a woman-friendly occupation on employment. In particular, the paper explores a unique historical setting -- the postmaster occupation during the early twentieth-century United States, which allowed married women to enter and provided women with flexible work arrangements and equal pay. With a novel dataset on postmaster appointments and census linking, I show that postmasters attracted qualified women who were not gainfully employed previously. However, the postmaster occupation offered women few benefits beyond the appointed term since women experienced a 27-percentage points reduction in their probability of employment three to four years after finishing their postmaster term. I also show that women postmasters were not more likely to be employed in 1940 than their 1920 women neighbors who had never been postmasters, despite their work experience. The lack of benefits for women's future employment is in part explained by state-level discrimination against married women working and the severity of the Great Depression. The second chapter estimates the returns to education for women during the mid-twentieth century United States. Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as instrumental variables, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women's labor market and marriage market outcomes. I show that an additional year of education increased women's probability of gainful employment by 7.1 percentage points and being in a skilled occupation by 1.2 to 3.3 percentage points The positive returns in the labor market were larger for women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and women from rural areas. On the other hand, education surprisingly did not affect women's probability of marriage, but it increased their probability of divorce and separation. Conditional on marriage formation, there is evidence of assortative mating and a positive effect of women's education on the husband's employment and wage earnings, which suggests an increasing level of education for women led to a better match in the marriage market. Women from lower socioeconomic backgrounds also benefited more in the marriage market. The third chapter studies whether the dissemination of germ theory--which provided new methods of controlling infectious disease, such as boiling water, washing hands, and isolating the sick--enabled households to prevent child mortality. We focus on physician households, who, as a group, should have had the clearest informational shock after the availability of germ theory. Our analysis evaluates a well-cited claim (based on descriptive evidence) that physicians' children died at similar rates to non-physicians' children before the discovery of germ theory but not after. We use a novel measure of child mortality that follows young children over time by linking households between censuses. Leveraging this nearly century-long measure of child mortality, we find that germ theory enabled physician households to reduce child mortality by 1-2 percentage points, a 7-14 percent reduction. We also show that this reduction in child mortality (after germ theory) is unique to physician households and is not an artifact of income or education.

Author dc:creator

• Li, Yiwen

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Feigenbaum, James J.

• Economics
• Economic history

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2144/53103

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.bu.edu:2144/53103