UCLA

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.