Between 1950 and 1970 the labor force participation rate of southern black males aged 16-19 declined by 27 percentage points. This decline has been attributed to two demand-side shocks: the mechanization of cotton agriculture in the 1950s and extensions in the coverage of the federal minimum...

Educational achievement in segregated school systems was considerably lower in the black schools than in the white schools. Economic historians have argued that the racial achievement gap reflected the discriminatory funding of the black schools. This paper assesses counterfactually the...

Recent research by Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger has used information on exact dates of birth in the 1960 to 1980 federal censuses to study the impact of compulsory schooling laws on school attendance. This paper modifies their methodology to analyze similar data in the 1900 federal census to...

Everyone knows that public school officials in the American South violated the Supreme Court's separate-but-equal decision. But did the violations matter? Yes, enforcement of separate-but-equal would have narrowed racial differences in school attendance in the early twentieth century South. But...

Between 1940 and 1950 wage differentials within and between labor market groups narrowed significantly - the so-called 'Great Compression'. This paper disaggregates the Great Compression into its public and private components. Wage compression in the public sector, along with a decline in the...

In 1900, 90 percent of America?s black population lived in the South and only 4.3 percent of those born in the region era living elsewhere. By 1950 the proportion of blacks living in the South had declined to 68 percent and 19.6 percent of those born in the region had left it. Using samples...