High Schools and the Uneven Rise in American Opportunity (with Ezra Karger and Peter Nencka) 

NBER WP #35068 (Reject and Resubmit at The Quarterly Journal of Economics)

Between 1850 and 1910, the share of young Americans living in towns with high schools increased from 17% to 46%—the fastest expansion of school access in U.S. history. Using new data on every high school built in the United States before 1945, we show that this expansion transformed economic opportunities for many young adults but widened class and racial inequalities. We find sharp increases in school attendance rates for high school-aged children in towns that opened a high school relative to children in nearby towns without one. Linking children to adult outcomes, we show that high schools increased women’s labor force participation and job quality, while reducing the probability of early marriage and childbearing. Increased access to high school accounts for a third of the increase in women’s labor force participation between 1870 and 1930. High schools had the largest effects on children from already-wealthy families, and did not, on average, benefit Black children. While the high school movement substantially narrowed gender gaps in labor market outcomes, it also widened existing race- and class-based disparities.

We have presented this paper at the NBER Development of the American Economy Summer Institute, the Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association, the Mountain West Economic History Conference, and the Notre Dame Economics of Education Workshop as well as at Georgetown University, Marquette University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. 

Remarriage as Informal Insurance: Evidence from the Introduction of Workers' Compensation (with Michael McKelligott)

Despite evidence that informal alternatives play a large role in the effectiveness of public programs, they are difficult to study due to a lack of data on informal agreements. We add to this literature by studying remarriage after fatal work accidents in the early-20th-century United States. We argue that remarriage was the most common form of risk protection available in our setting and examine the effects of gaining access to formal insurance—workers’ compensation death benefits—on widows and their families. Matching detailed individual-level data on work accidents with linked Census data and exploiting the quasi-random timing of fatal accidents relative to program implementation, we estimate that access to workers’ compensation substantially decreased remarriage among women widowed by a work accident. Reductions in remarriage were not driven by an increase in cohabiting; widows with access to the program were also much more likely to report being a single head of household several years later. We find suggestive evidence that these effects persisted 13 to 20 years after the accident. Decreases in remarriage are larger for women in states where widows lost benefits upon remarriage, suggesting a role for policy incentives, but still quite large (13 percentage points) in states with no such policy incentive. Taken together, the evidence suggests that remarriage was a very popular form of informal insurance but that a significant share of women shifted towards formal insurance once it became available. 

I have presented this paper (previously titled "How Much Do Cash Transfers Compensate Children for a Father’s Injury or Death?") at the BYU Economics Graduate Student Conference, the Mountain West Economic History Conference, the Midwest Economic Association, the NBER Development of the American Economy Summer Institute (poster), the Northwestern University Economic History Lunch, the Southern Economic Association, the University of Chicago Public/Labor Lunch, and the Virtual Economic History Workshop.

Work in Progress

Substitutability at Home: The Long-Run Effects of Access to Infant Formula on Maternal Labor Supply

I received a fellowship from the Larsson-Rosenquist Foundation Center for the Economics of Breastfeeding for this project. The Center is housed at the University of Zurich, where I presented a project proposal in June 2025. Here is a non-technical summary of the project idea.