Essays on Economic History and Labor Economics

Strada, Kelly Gail

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-chkw-0a10

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Essays on Economic History and Labor Economics

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This dissertation is a collection of three studies on topics in economic history and labor economics, in the United States. In the first chapter, I investigate the relationship between temporary paternal absence and long-term labor market outcomes. Specifically, I exploit the natural experiment of fathers’ WWII conscription, combined with longitudinal Census and Social Security data, to construct a quasi-exogenous – and temporary – measure of paternal absence. I document that, consistent with existing hypotheses on female “role model” effects, wives of draftees were 51% more likely to enter covered employment and that their daughters were 17% more likely to be in the labor force themselves when surveyed as adults. However, I find a stark substitution pattern between mothers’ and children’s wartime labor, and I contend that the latter better predicts higher future labor force attachment and income for women who were teenagers during WWII. I argue that paternal absence may not have necessarily been detrimental in this setting, in that it might have empowered daughters to be working girls first, and working women later.In the second chapter, I study the long-term effects of marriage restrictions on children. I exploit the staggered implementation of U.S. State laws which – starting in 1936 – required a negative syphilis test as a prerequisite for obtaining a marriage license. I find that these regulations increased the “cost of marriage”, and resulted in a 53% drop in marriage licenses and a 10% rise in births out of wedlock among non-Whites. I show that my results are primarily driven by less educated women and first time mothers - 45% of which remain unmarried several decades after delivery. Finally, I provide suggestive evidence for the consequences of single motherhood by comparing long-term outcomes for cohorts born in years straddling the passage of the legislation in each State. In the third chapter I explore the effects of military service on women during WWII. Using original Census transcripts combined with marriage and military records, I show how these women’s paths dramatically differed from the reactionary gender-conforming expectations of the 1950s in terms of labor force participation and their marital and fertility choices. I address issues of selection into military service by using propensity score matching and instrumental variable methods and argue for mechanisms through which the GI Bill and service itself might have empowered women, and Black women especially, allowing them to take on non-traditional gender roles.

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