The Impact of Early Investments in Urban School Systems in the United States

Ethan J. Schmick and Allison Shertzer

No 25663, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Cities in the United States dramatically expanded spending on public education in the years following World War I, with the average urban school district increasing per pupil expenditures by over 70 percent between 1916 and 1924. We provide the first evaluation of these historically unprecedented investments in public education by compiling a new dataset that links individuals to both the quality of the city school district they lived in as a child and their adult outcomes. Using plausibly exogenous growth in school spending generated by anti-German sentiment during and after World War I, we find that school resources significantly increased educational attainment and wages later in life, particularly for the children of low socioeconomic status households. Increases in expenditures can explain between 26 and 36 percent of the sizable increase in educational attainment of cohorts born between 1895 and 1915.

JEL-codes: H72 I26 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
Note: DAE ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25663.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:25663

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w25663

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().