Technical Documentation for: The Impact of Female Teachers on Female Students' Lifetime Well-Being

David Card, Ciprian Domnisoru, Seth Sanders, Lowell Taylor and Victoria Udalova

CES Technical Notes Series from Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau

Abstract: We document an enduring influence of female primary school teachers on their female students in rural America circa 1940. We exploit the geographic structure of the 1940 US Census to construct a measure of the local fraction of female teachers (FFT) for each child. We estimate county, enumeration district, and household fixed effects models comparing outcomes of boys and girls across areas with different FFT. Exposure to female teachers significantly improved girls' educational attainment—particularly among daughters of poorly-educated parents and in areas with limited labor market opportunities for women. To understand whether these gains had long-term effects, we link internal 1940 Census records for children aged 7–14 to IRS Form 1040 tax records from 1974 and 1979, 2000 Census long-form records, and Social Security Administration death records via Protected Identification Keys (PIKs). We find that the educational gains we observed in 1940 translated into delayed marriage and childbearing, marriage matches to better-educated husbands, higher lifetime household income, and increased longevity of women relative to men. This technical report summarizes data construction, code workflow, and key findings. A full discussion of the results and methodology is available in the associated working paper (Card, Domnisoru, Sanders, Taylor, and Udalova, 2026).

Keywords: Numident; Decennial; IRS-1040 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-06
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https://www2.census.gov/ces/tn/CES-TN-2026-14.pdf Abstract (application/pdf)
https://www.census.gov/about/adrm/ced/apply-for-access.html?CES-TN-2026-14 First version, 2026 (application/pdf)
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