How does access to public education affect occupational outcomes and intergenerational mobility? The UK’s 1870 Education Act, which introduced a public education system in England and Wales, provides a unique historical context in which to explore these questions. Using newly digitized historical records and a regression kink design, I find that public school access improved a child’s chance of obtaining an occupation requiring literacy in adulthood by as much as 17 pp. I use a triple difference specification to show that the effect extended to children further removed from the kink, and that the quality of occupational outcomes increased with each additional year of schooling. To study the reform’s effect on intergenerational mobility, I link father-son pairs across time, matching nearly 4 million individuals using full-count historical censuses. I find that by targeting the lower classes, public school introduction significantly improved intergenerational mobility, with the adult outcome gap between high- and low- class children decreasing by over 10%.
This paper breaks new ground in tracing the effects of historical child labour reform from childhood through to adulthood. I first show that by decreasing the opportunity cost and increasing the returns to schooling, Britain's 1860 Mining Act led to increased human capital acquisition among the children of coal miners. Then, using full-count census records linked across decades, I demonstrate that positive effects extended well into adulthood, as these same children became significantly more likely to obtain high skill, human capital-intensive occupations.
Empirical work examining the effects of education policy on language transmission is rare. I seek to address this deficiency by studying how the introduction of the 1870 Education Act affected the propensity to speak Welsh. The 1870 Act introduced compulsory schooling in many areas for the first time, and also greatly increased funding in others. Using individual-level census data and a difference-in-differences design, I find that exposure to either of these consequences of the Act decreased a child's likelihood of becoming a monoglot Welsh speaker in adulthood. However, exposure also initially increased the total number of Welsh speakers, driven by those raised in Anglophone households becoming more likely to become bilingual. This effect reversed within a generation, however, with the children of the treated less likely to speak Welsh.
During the First World War, death rates of local soldiers experienced by English and Welsh communities varied widely. Using this variation, I examine the effect of soldier mortality on changes in post-war poverty and employment outcomes. I find higher conflict death rates are associated with a fall in local poverty rates, with the effect appearing to be stronger among men than women. I also find evidence suggesting employment rates rose where death rates were higher, particularly among women. Together, these results suggest that while high death rates improved labour market conditions for those left behind, widowed women were likely forced into the labour market to avoid poverty. Finally, I demonstrate that war-induced falls in the ratio of marriage-aged males to females resulted in an increase in out-of-wedlock births, confirming previous findings showing that men often utilize marriage market bargaining power to shirk childcare responsibility.