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Title: From the Field to the Classroom: The Boll Weevil's Impact on Education in Rural Georgia

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2013

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Abstract: This paper contributes to the literature on the tradeoff between child labor and educational attainment by exploiting a unique shift in agricultural production that occurred in the early twentieth-century American South to analyze the role of a child labor intensive crop (cotton) in determining school enrollment and attendance rates. In the early twentieth-century South the harvesting of cotton required a large number of extra workers for three months of the year. Children were employed to help fill this seasonal labor demand. Because the harvest happened during the fall, it conflicted directly with traditional school attendance. This paper investigates how cotton production affected schooling decisions, with a particular focus on racial differences. Since whites were wealthier and attended better schools than blacks on average, a theoretical model of the time allocation of children predicts that the educational attainment of blacks was more responsive to changes in cotton production. I test this prediction using newly collected county-level panel data on educational attainment and quality in Georgia a major cotton producer. Because cotton production may be endogenous, I use the arrival of the cotton boll weevil as an instrumental variable. Preliminary 2SLS results suggest that a 10 percent reduction in cotton production caused a 2 percent increase in the school enrollment rate of blacks. By contrast, I find little evidence that cotton production affected the enrollment rate of whites. This result suggests that the production of child labor intensive agricultural products can have a significant negative impact on educational attainment. Additionally, the racial difference is important because it suggests that the shift away from cotton production after the arrival of the boll weevil may explain an economically significant amount of the convergence of the black-white education gap observed in the decades that followed.

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Authors: Baker, Richard B.

Publisher: EHES

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Race and Ethnicity

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