Research Projects
Below are abstracts, papers and slides for my various research projects. This page is not updated as frequently as it should be. For a more up-to-date list of papers, my Google Scholar page is likely your best bet. If you are curious about the state of a current paper, please do not hesitate to get in touch with me.
Published Papers
Segregation and the Initial Provision of Water in the United States (with Brian Beach and Martin Saavedra), 2022, AEA Papers and Proceedings, 112: 193-198.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (P&P version) Paper (longer working paper version) Slides
We develop a theoretical model to illustrate how segregation may have affected the timing and extensiveness of municipal investment in waterworks during the 19th century.
Data from over 1700 cities and towns match the key empirical predictions of our model: waterworks were built earlier in larger and more segregated cities as well as
cities with smaller black shares. In the context of our model, these results are consistent with segregation facilitating the exclusion of black households from water
provision. Analysis of health outcomes further supports this interpretation. Segregated cities experienced smaller health improvements following the construction of a
waterworks and were much slower to eliminate waterborne diseases.
The Antebellum Roots of Distinctively Black Names (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2022, Historical Methods, 55(1): 1-11.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper
This paper explores the existence of distinctively Black names in the antebellum era. Building on recent research that documents the existence of a national naming pattern
for African American males in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan, and Parman, 2014), we analyze
three distinct and novel antebellum data sources and uncover three stylized facts. First, the Black names identified by Cook, Logan and Parman using post-Civil War data
are common names among Blacks before Emancipation. Second, these same Black names are racially distinctive in the antebellum period. Third, the racial distinctiveness of
the names increases from the early 1800s to the time of the Civil War. Taken together, these facts provide support for the claim that Black naming patterns existed in the
antebellum era and that racial distinctiveness in naming patterns was an established practice well before Emancipation. These findings fur- ther challenge the view that
Black names are a product of twentieth century phenomena such as the Civil Rights Movement.
Disease, Downturns, and Wellbeing: Economic History and the Long-Run Impacts of COVID-19 (with Vellore Arthi), 2021, Explorations in Economic History, 79: 1-20.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper
How might COVID-19 affect human capital and wellbeing in the long run? The COVID-19 pandemic has already imposed a heavy human cost—taken together,
this public health crisis and its attendant economic downturn appear poised to dwarf the scope, scale, and disruptiveness of most modern pandemics.
What evidence we do have about other modern pandemics is largely limited to short-run impacts. Consequently, recent experience can do little to help us anticipate
and respond to COVID-19's potential long-run impact on individuals over decades and even generations. History, however, offers a solution. Historical crises offer
closer analogues to COVID-19 in each of its key dimensions—as a global pandemic, as a global recession—and offer the runway necessary to study the life-course and
intergenerational outcomes. In this paper, we review the evidence on the long-run effects on health, labor, and human capital of both historical pandemics
(with a focus on the 1918 Influenza Pandemic) and historical recessions (with a focus on the Great Depression). We conclude by discussing how past crises can
inform our approach to COVID-19—helping tell us what to look for, what to prepare for, and what data we ought to collect now.
Homefront: Black Servicemembers and Black Voters in the Civil Rights Era (with Thomas Koch and Trevon Logan), 2022, AEA Papers and Proceedings, 111: 32-36.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper
What is the effect of Black service in World War II on Black political participation? In particular, did Black voting increase more rapidly in areas with more Black
veterans after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA)? While the narrative history of the civil rights movement has long noted the role of Black service members
in positions of leadership, we do not know how that translated into broader-scale political activity in the Black community. That is, we do not know whether communities
with more veterans became more politically active overall. Specifically, we do not know how to disentangle those patterns from general changes in Black political
participation (Cascio and Washington 2014).
To answer this question, we combine detailed information on military enlistment for World War II with pre- and post-VRA voter registration data by race to estimate
the impact of Black military participation on Black voting outcomes. Exploiting the variation in Black enlistment in World War II with subsequent voter registration data
by race, we seek to measure the impact of Black enlistment in Black voter registration. We find that counties with more Black WWII enlistees had significantly higher Black
voter registration post-VRA than other counties. Our estimates show that each additional Black WWII enlistee resulted in roughly two additional Black registered voters
after the VRA.
Segregation and Southern Lynching (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2018, Social Science History , 42(4) 635-675.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides VoxEU Column
The empirical relationship between racial segregation and racial violence is unknown. We show that the existing economic, social, and political
theories of lynching implicitly contain hypotheses about the relationship between racial segregation and racial violence, which we further note
is consistent with general theories of social conflict. Since Southern lynching occurred in rural and urban areas, traditional measures of racial
segregation cannot be used to estimate the relationship. Earlier analysis has analyzed the relationship between lynching and racial proportions,
a poor proxy for racial segregation. We use a newly developed measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data
(Logan and Parman 2015), which exploits complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the racial similarity
of next door neighbors. This new measure distinguishes between the effects of increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to
segregate within a location given a particular racial composition. Using this comprehensive measure of racial residential segregation for every
Southern county in the United States, we estimate the relationship between racial segregation and lynching. We find that conditional on racial
composition, racially segregated environments were much more likely to experience lynchings and to have more lynchings. In general, a one standard
deviation increase in segregation in 1880 resulted in one additional lynching in a county from 1882 to 1930. The result is robust to numerous
controls, functional form assumptions, the inclusion of traditional segregation measures, proxies for racial inequality, and a host of potential
confounders such as antebellum antecedents of segregation and black political involvement during Reconstruction. Consistent with the hypothesis
that segregation is related to interracial violence, we find that segregation is highly correlated with African American lynching, but
uncorrelated with white lynching. We conclude by describing how our results call for reformulating theories of Southern lynching to focus on
social interactions and interracial proximity.
Segregation and Mortality Over Time and Space (with Trevon Logan), 2017,
Social Science and Medicine, 199: 77-86.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper
Few studies have been able to measure the evolution of segregation on health disparities or assess
whether those disparities existed in rural communities prior to the Great Migration of African Americans
to urban centers. We use a newly developed measure of historical racial residential segregation based on
individual-level data. The measure exploits complete census manuscript files to identify the races of
next-door neighbors. This measure is the first and only measure of historical segregation for rural
communities, allowing us to greatly extend the empirical analysis of the effects of racial segregation on
health over space and time. Using this comprehensive measure of racial residential segregation, we
estimate the historical relationship between racial segregation and mortality. We find that conditional on
racial composition, racially segregated environments had higher mortality rates and it was not always
the case that the outcomes for blacks were worse than those of whites. These effects of segregation on
health differed between urban and rural locations. We conclude by noting how comprehensive measures
of segregation can extend the analysis of structural factors in racial health disparities to rural residents
and to the historical evolution of health disparities.
The National Rise in Residential Segregation (with Trevon Logan), 2017, Journal of Economic History , 77(1) 127-170.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides Additional tables VoxEU Column
This paper introduces a new measure of residential segregation based on individual-level data.
We exploit complete census manuscript files to derive a measure of segregation based upon the
racial similarity of next door neighbors. The measure can distinguish between the effects of
increasing racial homogeneity of a location and the tendency to segregate within a location given
a particular racial composition. Our measure allows us to analyze segregation consistently and
comprehensively for all areas in the United States, overcomes several of the shortcomings of
traditional segregation indices, and allows for a richer view of the variation in segregation
patterns across time and space. We show that the fineness of our measure reveals aspects of
racial sorting that cannot be captured by traditional indices. Analysis of neighbor-based
segregation over time establishes several new facts about segregation. The dramatic increase in
segregation in the twentieth century was not driven by black migratory patterns, urbanization,
or white flight to suburban areas, but rather resulted from a national increase in racial sorting
at the household level. The likelihood that an African American household had a non-African
American neighbor declined by more than 15 percentage points (more than a 25\% decrease) through
the mid twentieth century. In all areas of the United States -- North and South, urban and rural
-- racial segregation increased dramatically.
A few maps of American segregation patterns (click to expand or collapse)
Segregation and Home Ownership in the Early Twentieth Century (with Trevon Logan), 2017,
American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 107(5) 410-414.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
We use new county-level segregation estimates for the period of 1880 to 1940 to document a general rise in
residential segregation in both urban and rural counties occurring alongside rising homeownership rates.
However, we find a negative correlation between segregation and homeownership across space for both black
and white households. Following Fetter (2013), we show that living in a more segregated county substantially
reduced the impact of GI Bill benefits on white homeownership rates, suggesting that segregated locations
potentially hindered both white and black homeownership.
Childhood Health and Sibling Outcomes: Nurture Reinforcing Nature During the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, 2015,
Explorations in Economic History, 58 (October) 22-43.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
The impacts of a negative health shock during childhood can have long term consequences for a person
in terms of health, human capital formation and labor market outcomes. However, the effects of the
health shock are not necessarily limited to the afflicted individual. By raising the costs of the child
both in terms of health care and human capital investment, the health shock impacts a family's resource
allocation decisions. As a result, a significant negative health shock for one child can influence the
outcomes of his or her healthy siblings. This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic to assess the ways
in which a major negative health shock influences family planning and investment decisions. By linking
educational and health data from military records to census information on childhood households, I show
that the influenza pandemic impacted levels of investment in not only those children born during the pandemic
but also their siblings. The results suggest that having a child born during the pandemic led families to
shift educational investments to older children. Older siblings of a child born during the pandemic received
an additional quarter year of education while younger siblings received slightly less education relative to
individuals without a sibling born during the pandemic. These results suggest that the effects of childhood
health shocks on siblings are an important consideration when evaluating the potential consequences of childhood
health interventions.
The Mortality Consequences of Distinctively Black Names (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2016, Explorations in Economic History , 59 (January) 114-125.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides VoxEU Column
Race-specific given names have been linked to a range of negative outcomes in contemporary studies, but little is known about their long term
consequences. Building on recent research which documents the existence of a national naming pattern for African American males in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Cook, Logan and Parman 2014), we analyze long-term consequences of distinctively racialized names.
Using over three million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina from 1802 to 1970, we find a robust within-race
mortality difference for African American men who had distinctively black names. Having an African American name added more than one year of
life relative to other African American males. The result is robust to controlling for the age pattern of mortality over time and environmental
factors which could drive the mortality relationship. The result is not consistently present for infant and child mortality, however.
As much as 10% of the historical between-race mortality gap would have been closed if every black man were given a black name.
Suggestive evidence implies that cultural factors not captured by socioeconomic or human capital measures may be related to the mortality
differential.
Childhood Health and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Genetic Brothers in Arms, 2014, Journal of Economic History , 75(1) 30-64.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
Negative shocks to childhood health can have a lasting impact on the economic success of an individual
by altering families' schooling investment decisions. This paper introduces a new dataset of brothers
serving in World War II and uses it to demonstrate that improvements in childhood health led to substantial
increases in educational attainment in the first half of the twentieth century. By exploiting variation in
health within families, the data show that this relationship between childhood health and educational
attainment holds even after controlling for both observed and unobserved household and environmental
characteristics.
A few maps and graphs of height and educational attainment in the 1940s (click to expand or collapse)
Distinctively Black Names in the American Past (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2014, Explorations in Economic History , 53 (June) 64-82.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
We document the existence of a distinctive national naming pattern for African Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
We use census records to identify a set of high-frequency names among African Americans that were unlikely to be held by whites. We confirm
the distinctiveness of the names using over five million death certificates from Alabama, Illinois and North Carolina from the early twentieth
century. The names we identify in the census records are similarly distinctive in these three independent data sources. Surprisingly,
approximately the same percentage of African Americans had "black names" historically as they do today. No name that we identify as a historical
black name, however, is a contemporary black name. The literature has assumed that black names are a product of the Civil Rights Movement, yet
our results suggest that they are a long-standing cultural norm among African Americans. This is the first evidence that distinctively
racialized names existed long before the Civil Rights Era, establishing a new fact in the historical literature.
Good Schools Make Good Neighbors: Human Capital Spillovers in Early-20th Century Agriculture, 2012, Explorations in Economic History , 49(3) 316-334.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
Education has an important but often underappreciated role in agricultural productivity. I present evidence from the Midwest at the start of the twentieth century
showing that the emerging public schools were helping farmers successfully adapt to a
variety of agricultural innovations. I construct a unique dataset of farmers containing
detailed geographical information and use it to estimate both the private returns to
schooling and human capital spillovers across neighboring farms. The results indicate
that public schools contributed substantially to agricultural productivity at the turn
of the century and that a large portion of this contribution came through spillovers.
These findings shed new light on the forces underlying public school expansion in the
United States at the beginning of the twentieth century and the role of schools and
the agricultural sector in overall economic growth more generally.
A few farm-level maps of earnings, education, religion and nativity (click to expand or collapse)
Distribution of annual earnings: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold
Distribution of total schooling with school locations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold
Distribution of high school and college attainment with school locations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold
Distribution of church affiliations: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold
Distribution of parents' place of birth: Chickasaw, Poweshiek, Ringgold
American Mobility and the Expansion of Public Education, 2011, Journal of Economic History , 71(1) 105-132.
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
Educational institutions and intergenerational mobility are closely related with access to
schools a major determinant of a child's future success. This paper offers new insight into this
relationship with a study of mobility during the United States' expansion of public schools
in the early twentieth century. A new intergenerational dataset is used to establish a sharp
decline in income mobility over the twentieth century and a negative correlation between public
school expansion and mobility. Educational attainment estimates reveal that this negative
relationship was a product of wealthy families being more responsive to improving school
access than poor families.
Working Papers
Health, Gender and Mobility: Intergenerational Correlations in Longevity Over Time
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
Changes in intergenerational mobility over time have been the focus of extensive research.
However, existing studies have been limited to studying only males and relying on intergenerational
correlations in outcome variables that often lack clear welfare implications. This paper
introduces a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility that relies on health
measures rather than occupational measures to assess the strength of the relationship between
the outcomes of parents and their children. It introduces a new intergenerational dataset spanning
seven decades that is constructed by linking individuals' death certificates to those of their
parents. Relying on death certificate data allows for linking both males and females to their
parents. Life span calculated from these death certificates provides a measure of welfare that
has a consistent interpretation across time and genders. Intergenerational correlations in life
span serve as my measure of mobility. I find that a son's life span is strongly correlated with
his father's and that this correlation has strengthened over time. Daughter's life span shows
a similarly strong relationship with mother's life span that has remained relatively stable over
the past century. Differences in life span are shown to be correlated with occupational status and
occupational transitions from one generation to the next.
Adoption and Adult Outcomes in the Early 20th Century (with Chiaki Moriguchi)
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper Slides
Modern research has found strong links between family structure and children's outcomes.
One of the robust findings is that stepchildren and adopted children have worse adult
outcomes compared to biological children. However, we know very little about how non-biological
children fared historically. In this study, by linking adopted children across U.S. federal
censuses in the first half of the 20th century, we create a new dataset that contains rich
information on both their childhood households and adult outcomes. To control for household
heterogeneity, we also follow (non-adopted) siblings of adopted children into their adulthood.
This unique dataset enables us to compare the long-run outcomes of adopted children and biological
children controlling for observable and unobservable household characteristics.
Our preliminary analysis suggests that educational attainment, income, and marriage patterns of
adopted children differed significantly from non-adopted children. Overall, our study brings
new historical evidence to the research on family structure.
Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Mortality in the 20th Century: Evidence from the Carolinas (with Trevon Logan)
Abstract (click to expand or collapse) Paper (external link)
Racial and socioeconomic gaps in mortality persisted throughout the twentieth century. We know little, however, about how racial or
socioeconomic gaps in mortality were related to each other or how cause-specific mortality evolved over the twentieth century more
generally. Demographers have repeatedly documented serious data problems that limit our ability to analyze these issues. In an attempt
to overcome these problems, we link a random sample of death certificates taken at five year intervals from 1910 to 1975 to the
manuscript federal census files of the deceased's early in life and then to the death certificates of the deceased's parents. To our
knowledge, the data we construct is the first of its kind in linking parent and child death certificate information with the additional
information from the census files. We show that our research design allows us to construct a panel data set that allows us to look at
mortality (both general and cause-specific) over time and for specific cohorts. This paper presents preliminary evidence from our pilot
study of death certificates from the Carolinas in the twentieth century, documenting racial and occupational differences in mortality over
the twentieth century. We outline several avenues of future research to be investigated with this data.
Other Publications
Long-run Analysis of Regional Inequalities in the US (with Bradley Hardy and Trevon Logan), article for an edited volume of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 37(1): 49-69.
The Historical Role of Race and Policy for Regional Inequality (with Bradley Hardy and Trevon Logan), chapter in the Hamilton Project's Place-Based Policies for Shared Economic Growth, 2018
Education, chapter for the Oxford Handbook of American Economic History , 2018.
Racial Segregation and Southern Lynching (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2017, VoxEU.
Black Names: Past, Present and Future (with Lisa Cook and Trevon Logan), 2015, VoxEU.
The Rise of Residential Segregation (with Trevon Logan), 2015, VoxEU.
Review of The Great Escape: Health, Wealth and the Origins of Inequality, 2014, EH.net.
Review essay of Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time, 2012, Business History Review, 86(2): 351-356.
The Private and Public Effects of School Reform, 2009, Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations, Journal of Economic History, 69(2) 550-554.
Press Related to my Research
Marginal Revolution
NPR's Code Switch
Washington Post's Wonkblog
Another from Washington Post's Wonkblog
Chicago Magazine
Vox
NBER Digest
The Lantern
