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.
Combining district-level measures of World War I military fatalities with full-count census microdata, we show that wartime mortality increased postwar female labor force participation in England and Wales. Women shifted away from traditionally female occupations, while military deaths increased the shares of single and widowed women, whose participation rates were higher. Yet the overall effect of military mortality on postwar female labor force participation remained modest. A harmonized comparison with France suggests that stronger internal migration in England and Wales rapidly dissipated local marriage- and labor-market imbalances, while more generous pensions for war widows weakened their labor supply response.
State sponsorship of religion has theoretically ambiguous effects. Financial support can increase religious participation by funding proselytization efforts, or reduce clergy effort by stifling competition and limiting accountability. We study these forces in eighteenth-century Britain using a natural experiment. During a period that saw the rapid rise of non-state ("dissenting") sects, the state issued lottery-based grants of land to support poor state clergy through a program called Queen Anne's Bounty. Winning a grant increased clergy income by 80% initially, with this effect converging to 5% 30 years later, as lottery-losers eventually won grants themselves. Winning parishes were less likely to report the presence of dissenting households in the short term, and less likely to construct dissenting churches in the long term, yet score lower on a composite index of religious service provision. We provide evidence that this latter channel lowers overall religious participation. Our results support a hypothesis going back to Adam Smith that by limiting competition in the marketplace of ideas, state sponsorship of religion can negatively affect religious life.