The United States Fertility Decline: Lessons from Slavery and Slave Emancipation

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop a model of household production in the 19th century United States with own children and slave labor as inputs and use the model to show how the price of own children would have changed with changes in the household’s slaveholdings. I propose that slave children born to mothers owned by Southern households imparted plausibly exogenous shocks to the net price of the slaveowning household’s own children. Using a panel dataset of white Southern households between 1850 and 1870, I measure the fertility response of families to this changing price and show a strong, negative correlation between the predicted price of children and household fertility rates. To further corroborate these results, I measure the fertility response of households to another shock to the price of their own children: slave emancipation. Again, I find a strong, negative correlation between predicted prices and fertility rates. The results are consistent with theories of the demographic transition centered on the rising price of children

The United States Fertility Decline: Lessons from Slavery and Slave Emancipation

Economic theories of fertility decline often center on the rising net price of children. But empirical tests of such theories are hampered both by the inability to adequately measure this price and by endogeneity bias. I develop a model of household production in the 19th century United States with own children and slave labor as inputs and use the model to show how the price of own children would have changed with changes in the household’s slaveholdings. I propose that slave children born to mothers owned by Southern households imparted plausibly exogenous shocks to the net price of the slaveowning household’s own children. Using a panel dataset of white Southern households between 1850 and 1870, I measure the fertility response of families to this changing price and show a strong, negative correlation between the predicted price of children and household fertility rates. To further corroborate these results, I measure the fertility response of households to another shock to the price of their own children: slave emancipation. Again, I find a strong, negative correlation between predicted prices and fertility rates. The results are consistent with theories of the demographic transition centered on the rising price of children

Replication Data for: "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men"

The data and programs replicate tables and figures from "Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men", by Alsan and Wanamaker. Please see the Readme file for additional details

HOPE for Community College Students: The Impact of Merit Aid on Persistence, Graduation, and Earnings

Abstract Community colleges play a major role in postsecondary education, yet previous research has emphasized the impact of merit aid on four-year students rather than two-year students. Furthermore, researchers have focused on the impact of merit aid on enrollment and outcomes during college, but to my knowledge, none have yet considered the impact of aid on earnings after college. This paper utilizes discontinuities in eligibility criteria for a large merit scholarship to examine the local impact of aid on student outcomes both during college and after college. The findings suggest that reducing the cost of community college does not impact persistence, academic performance, degree completion, expected earnings, or short-term earnings after college for marginally eligible students. JEL: I22, I23, H75, J0