Draft - May 2024

Do narrow, or improbable, paths out of poverty, such as those in sports and entertainment, reduce the demand for schooling? We study the effect of professional baseball on educational attainment in the Dominican Republic, where all Major League Baseball (MLB) teams recruit teenage boys. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to MLB’s sudden entry into the Dominican Republic based on preexisting local baseball cultures and leverage the fact that girls are not recruited for baseball. Using difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that baseball has no measurable effect on school attendance, in contrast to highly publicized accounts. 

This project sheds light on immigration to less developed countries by introducing a uniquely large and detailed microdata set compiled by digitizing all residency permit applications submitted to the Dominican Republic from 1940 to 1954. In contrast to the primary receiving countries in the Americas, the Dominican Republic attracted immigrants predominately from neighboring Haiti and nearby islands in the Caribbean rather than from Europe. The foreign-born population of the Dominican Republic at mid-century closely matches that of the rest of the Spanish circum-Caribbean in terms of volume, share of the total population, and percentages coming from the Americas and bordering countries, respectively. In this sense, studying immigration to the Dominican Republic contributes to our understanding of immigration to the region more generally. The applications include detailed demographic and economic data, as well as place of departure and date and port of entry. We will track occupational and geographic mobility over time by linking to renewal applications to study policies that restricted the entry and mobility of Haitians.

This paper conducts a meta-analysis of 1,466 historical child growth studies to reconstruct child stunting rates, the share of children who are too short for their age, for 116 countries from the earliest date possible to the present. This data complements and extends the modern Joint Malnutrition Estimates database of country-level stunting rates, which begins in the 1980s. We find that many European countries had stunting rates similar to current LMICs at the turn of the twentieth century, but child stunting fell in the early twentieth century reaching very low levels before World War II. Stunting rates were also very high in Japan and Korea. However, stunting rates were surprisingly low historically in the European settler colonies, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean. Historical comparisons of child stunting add a new dimension to the historical health transition and allow for more direct historical lessons for the fight against stunting today.

Most of the world's highest homicide rates are found in the Caribbean basin. Using the synthetic control method for the territory with the best data coverage, Puerto Rico, I show that the region's extraordinarily high rates of violence are related to drug trafficking, which quickly expanded after the 1973 Chilean coup pushed cocaine trafficking north to Colombia and through the Caribbean. To rule out other leading explanations such as inequality or culture, I draw on newly assembled data for British and American dependencies and show that, for most of the 20th century, homicide rates in the Caribbean basin were much lower than they are presently and were usually lower than the United States, especially the South. Beginning in the 1970s, homicide rates increased suddenly and rapidly. The roots of violence are shallow. 

Coming soon.