In the mid-twentieth century, relative black wage growth in the North lagged behind the Jim Crow South. Inter-regional migration may explain this trend. Four million black southerners moved North from 1940 to 1970, more than doubling the northern black population. Black migrants will exert more competitive pressure on black wages if blacks and whites are imperfect substitutes. I use variation in the relative black-white migrant flows across skill groups to estimate the elasticity of substitution by race in the northern economy. I then calculate a counterfactual rate of black-white wage convergence in the North in the absence of southern migration. Migration slowed the pace of northern convergence by 50 percent, more than accounting for the regional gap. Ongoing migration appears to have been an impediment to black economic assimilation in the urban North.

This paper investigates the effects of exporting on wages, specifically the claim that workers are paid higher wages if they are employed in manufacturing plants that export vis-à-vis plants that do not export. Past research on US plants has supported the existence of an export wage premium, though European studies dispute those results calling for more care in econometric investigation to control for worker characteristics. We answer this call developing a matched employee-employer data set linking worker characteristics from the one-in-six long form of the Decennial Household Census to manufacturing establishment data from the Longitudinal Research Database. Analysis focuses on 1990 and 2000 data for the Los Angeles Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area. Our results confirm that the average wage in manufacturing plants that export is greater than that in manufacturing plants that do not export. However, after controlling for worker characteristics such as age, gender, education, race and nationality, the export wage premium vanishes. That is, when comparing workers with similar characteristics, there is no wage difference between exporting and non-exporting plants. These results concord with recent findings from Europe and elsewhere.

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters tied together under the broad umbrella of economic history. The first chapter examines the effect of access to schooling on black crime in this historic period. I use the construction of 5,000 new schools in the US south, funded by northern philanthropist Julius Rosenwald between 1913 and 1932, as a quasi-natural experiment which increased the educational attainment of southern black students. I match a sample of male prisoners and non-prisoners from the 1920-1940 Censuses backwards to their birth families in previous Census waves. I find that one year of access to a Rosenwald school decreased the probability of being a prisoner by 0.04-0.10 percentage points (10-15 percent of the mean).

The second chapter examines immigrant assimilation in the early 20th century US. During the Age of Mass Migration (1850-1913), the US maintained an open border and absorbed 30 million European immigrants. In newly-assembled panel data, we show that immigrants did not face a substantial initial earnings penalty, as is commonly found, and experienced occupational advancement at the same rate as natives. Cross-sectional patterns are driven by biases from declining arrival cohort quality and departures of negatively-selected return migrants. We show that these findings vary substantially across sending countries and explore potential mechanisms.

The third chapter uses an exogenous change in the language of instruction in South African schools in 1955 to examine the effect of mother-tongue versus "market" language instruction on long-term educational and economic outcomes. Using the 1980 South African census, a difference-in-difference framework allows me to estimate the effect of increasing mother-tongue instruction for black students from four to six years. I find small positive effects on wages which I interpret as evidence of increases in human capital. I find positive effects on the ability to read and write, negative effects on the ability to speak English and Afrikaans, and positive effects on educational attainment. I examine heterogeneous effects by region. This paper is relevant to language policy in post-colonial countries as well as Spanish speaking areas of the United States.

This dissertation uses the institutions of public schooling in the U.S. as a lens to study how broad economic trends -- rising income inequality and the business cycle -- affect household residential choice, neighborhood composition and popular support for local public goods.

The first chapter explores the consequences of rising neighborhood inequality for public schools. Income inequality across neighborhoods more than doubled in the U.S. between 1970 and 2010. This spatial reallocation may affect public schools through changes to the distribution of peers and support for local taxes. I find that rising neighborhood inequality within a school district increases local school funding, but also depresses human capital investment, primarily due to a widening gap between low- and high-income neighborhoods. These results are robust to instrumenting for changes in neighborhood incomes with the initial allocation of households interacted with differential national trends in household income growth by percentile.

The second chapter proposes an economic model to explain these findings. Public schools are customarily funded by a district-wide property tax, yet school quality varies considerably within districts due partly to neighborhood differences in student preparedness. In response, high-income households may choose to cluster in a few neighborhoods, lowering the average income of households in the other neighborhoods. The district's median voter, to compensate for a decline in peer quality in her own neighborhood, may elect to raise the district-wide tax rate. Consistent with the implications of this model, I find empirically that declining income in the median voter's neighborhood is associated with increasing local tax revenue per household.

The third chapter examines the business cycle dynamics of public school quality valuation. While the value of school quality improvements is critical to human capital investment decisions and education policy, little is known about how it varies with the business cycle. We apply a hedonic pricing model to data on home sales in Los Angeles County between 2000 and 2013 to study changes over time in homeowners' valuations, exploiting elementary school attendance boundaries to provide identifying variation. We find that homeowners' valuations are countercyclical -- they value quality improvements more during "busts" than in "booms."

This dissertation studies the effect of scientific discoveries, regulation, and changes in market access on the American and Japanese brewing industries over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Breweries adapted to these shocks by switching to new technologies, products, and geographical markets. In the long run, this adaptation process shaped the structure of the brewing industry and introduced competition and new production techniques in the soft-drink and biotechnology industries. Using detailed data at the brewery-level, coupled with natural experiments, I study the repercussions of this adaptation mechanism across industries and over time.

In the first chapter, I study how private trade costs affect the relocation of industries in response to market integration. I focus on the relocation of the American brewing industry during the late nineteenth century, when migration and the expansion of the American railroad network reduced the costs of reaching consumers troughout the US. Using a brewery-level database that I constructed, I show that the endogenous adoption of bottling --a private reduction in marginal trade costs that required the payment of a one-time cost-- amplified the effect of market integration on the relocation of the brewing industry from the East Coast to the Midwest of the United States.

In the second chapter, I study whether early exposure to demand reductions improves the performance of firms during future demand shocks. I focus on the American brewing industry during prohibition in the early twentieth century. Some breweries faced early reductions in demand when nearby counties introduced prohibition at the local level. Other breweries were insulated from local prohibitions until the start of federal prohibition, when the entire US prohibited the production and distribution of alcoholic drinks. I follow 1,300 breweries throughout both local and federal prohibitions, using firm-level data that I collected. Breweries that faced early reductions in demand were 12\% more likely to survive the full prohibition period, from before local prohibition until the end of federal prohibition, than breweries that did not face early reductions in demand. This increase in survival occurred because a group of breweries made early investments in machinery that later facilitated product switching into soda and other foodstuffs.

The third chapter is coauthored with Michael Darby and Lynne Zucker. Scientists affiliated to Japanese breweries authored 81\% of the academic articles produced by breweries all over the world between 2000 and 2005 --50 percentage points more than twenty years earlier. Most of this increase in academic production occurred between 1986 and 1996, when the number of published articles affiliated to Japanese breweries increased sixfold. We show that this increase in academic production is the result of product diversification towards the pharmaceutical and biochemical sectors in which collaboration with academic scientists is common. Product diversification was possibly driven by reductions of barriers to entry in the Japanese market for beer. Diversification and innovation became persistent over time because the new sectors were intensive in knowledge that was tacit and therefore excludable.

During the Great Depression, as today, migrants were accused of taking jobs and crowding relief rolls. At the time, protest concerned internal migrants rather than the foreign born. We investigate the effect of net migration on local labor markets, instrumenting for migrant flows to a destination with extreme weather events and variation in New Deal programs in typical sending areas. Migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents. Instead, migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work and/or access to relief jobs. Given the period?s high unemployment, these lost work opportunities were costly to existing residents.

American cities, after decades of decline, are regaining affluent and highly educated residents. This dissertation examines these trends at the neighborhood level and documents that resurgence, in the form of gentrification, is prevalent in cities, specifically in downtown neighborhoods near employment centers. My results indicate a fundamental shift from city center decline to growth around 1990, which motivates my focus on exploring two novel causes of gentrification.

In Chapter 1, I demonstrate that declining gender wage gaps since 1980, and the associated influence on female labor force participation and marriage decisions, are one cause of gentrification. As women increasingly invest in human capital and delay marriage they are more likely to move to, and remain in, urban neighborhoods close to employments areas, allowing these neighborhoods to develop high-quality amenities which facilitate further redevelopment. I document that as the gender wage gap declines so too does the probability of marriage and that, in turn, marital status factors heavily into family residential location decisions, with singles systematically opting to live closer to employment centers. Overall, I find that falling gender wage gaps had a significant but heterogeneous effect on neighborhood prosperity that benefited those neighborhoods nearest the city center. Specifically, I find that the drop in the gender wage gap from 1970 to 2010 can explain 40\% of the average national change in city center income over the same period. One potential factor that influenced the decline in gender wage gaps was a shift in the labor market returns to social skills, a shift that disproportionately aligned with female skill endowments relative to men. I return to this topic in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 2, I document the role that condominium development played in gentrification. The advent of condominiums offered high income individuals a legal form to own, rather than rent, high-density real estate close to employment centers. I use condominium conversion ordinances at the municipal level as a source of exogenous variation in condominium development. Using a differences-in-differences set-up, I find that the passage of ordinances limited the development of condominiums in cities subject to regulations that made it more costly to convert housing stock to condominiums. With this approach, I am able to establish a causal effect of condominium development on certain gentrification outcomes, including income and education.

In Chapter 3, I introduce a framework for estimating the labor market returns to social capital and explore related mechanisms. I find that the wage return to increasing one's high school network by approximately five friends is equivalent to the return to one additional year of schooling. To better understand the mechanisms that underlie this return, I introduce a game theory model wherein students optimize their time allocation between studying and socializing. Empirical results are consistent with model predictions, specifically in that students make social investments in activities, such as drinking alcohol, that generate friendships at the expense of academic achievement. As an application, I demonstrate baseline estimates that suggest there are positive returns to attending a so-called "party" school for college.

In these essays, I study the long-term effects of education policies and birth order on educational and labor market outcomes.

In my first chapter I study the long-term effects of one of the first early education programs in the US – the Kindergarten Movement (1890-1910). I collected unique data on the opening of public kindergartens across cities in the US during this period. I then link over 100,000 children living in these cities to subsequent Censuses where their adult outcomes can be observed. I find that kindergarten attendance had large effects on adult outcomes. On average, the affected cohorts had about 0.6 additional years of schooling and six percent more income (as measured by occupational score). These effects were substantially larger for second generation immigrant children. The effects of this early intervention are most likely due to language acquisition and the attainment of various “soft skills” early in childhood.

The second chapter was co-authored with Maria Laura Alzua and Leonardo Gasparini, who directed the project. In this chapter, we study the long-term effects of an educational reform in Argentina. In the nineties Argentina implemented a large education reform that mainly implied the extension of compulsory education in two additional years. The timing in the implementation substantially varied across provinces, providing a source of identification of the causal effects of the reform. The estimations from difference-in-difference models suggest that the reform had a positive impact on years of education and the probability of high school graduation. The impact on labor market outcomes was positive for the non-poor youths, but almost null for the poor.

In my third chapter I use US historical data to empirically test whether long-term birth order effects differ across the leading and lagging regions of the country in the Pre-War World II period. To do so, I create a large panel dataset by linking more than two million children across the 1920 and the 1940 full census counts, and to the World War II army enlistment records. I then study birth order effects on various long-term outcomes (with emphasis on educational outcomes). I find that in general, birth order effects are positive in the “developing” south—i.e. younger siblings do better than older siblings— and negative in the relatively modern north, which is consistent with the available evidence from contemporary data for developed and developing countries. I then exploit state level variation to show that birth order effects are positively correlated with the share of rural population, child labor rates and negatively correlated with the level mechanization in agriculture. I also show that, regardless the state of birth, the effects tend to be larger for the poor. Finally, I complement the analysis by looking at birth order effects on earnings and adult height. While I find relatively similar results for earnings, I find no birth order effects on adult height, which suggests that we can rule out improvements in health or nutrition as the potential mechanisms behind the effects on education and labor outcomes.