The Legacy of King Cotton: Agricultural Patterns and the Quality of Structural Change

Yeonha Jung

No trjfz, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Agricultural patterns could have diverse impact on long-run economic development. In the context of the US South, this paper examines the legacy of cotton on economic development focusing on a novel channel of structural change. Exploiting variation in cotton production along with agro-climatic conditions, I show that the legacy of cotton has impeded local economic development exclusively as of the mid-twentieth century. The structural break is found to be a consequence of cotton mechanization. Evidence from exogenous variation in the boll weevil infestation shows that cotton farming was strongly dependent on tenant farmers with little human capital. Following cotton mechanization, cotton tenants were largely displaced and absorbed by the manufacturing sector. I then find that the inflow of cotton tenants has reduced labor productivity in the manufacturing sector. Beyond the composition effect, the negative impact on manufacturing productivity has persisted in the long-run through demand-side. Employing an index of state-level policy environment, I exploit within-state variation to show that the legacy of cotton has induced unskill-biased technical change in manufacturing.

Date: 2018-05-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5af5f50a7bf0b90011e3e0e5/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:trjfz

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/trjfz

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().