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From the Field to the Classroom: The Boll Weevil's Impact on Education in Rural Georgia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2015

Richard B. Baker
Richard B. Baker*
Affiliation:
Richard B. Baker is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, The College of New Jersey, P.O. Box 7718, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, New Jersey 08628. E-mail: bakerr@tcnj.edu.
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Abstract

I examine how production of a child labor–intensive crop (cotton) affected schooling in the early twentieth-century American South. Because cotton production may be endogenous, presence of an agricultural pest (the boll weevil) is employed as an instrument. Using newly collected county-level data for Georgia, I find a 10 percent reduction in cotton caused a 2 percent increase in black enrollment rate, but had little effect on white enrollment. The shift away from cotton following the boll weevil's arrival explains 30 percent of the narrowing of the racial differential in enrollment rates between 1914 and 1929.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 1128 - 1160
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2015 

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Footnotes

I thank Robert Margo, Carola Frydman, and Claudia Olivetti for invaluable advice. I would also like to thank Paul Rhode, Daniel Rees, Eric Hilt, Carolyn Moehling, Elisabeth Perlman, Laura Salisbury, Russell Weinstein, and Dustin Frye for their thoughtful suggestions at various stages of this article's development. I owe gratitude to three anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved the quality of this work. Valuable comments from participants at workshops at Boston University, Harvard, Clemson, the 2013 meetings of the Frontier Research in Economic and Social History in Valencia, Western Economic Association International, NBER Development of the American Economy Summer Institute, EconCon, European Historical Economic Society, Economic History Association, and Southern Economic Association are gratefully acknowledged. Assistance from Steven Engerrand and other members of the knowledgeable staff at the Georgia Archives is deeply appreciated. I recognize financial support from the Economic History Association and the Institute for Economic Development at Boston University.

References

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