Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Internal Migration and the Diffusion of Schooling in the US

Abstract

By the late 19th century, the United States achieved very strong school enrollment rates. This project examines the role of internal migration in the spread of education, using novel historical data that covers many aspects of American economic and social life before and after the Civil War. The information recorded in the dataset includes the value of the taxed property and the amounts of tax revenue raised the number of public and private schools, teachers, and pupils in those schools; their finances by revenue source; the number of libraries and newspapers printed; and the prevailing wages paid to different kinds of labor.

Utilizing this data, the project considers potential mechanisms to understand how internal migration affected local schooling choices.

The project explores how migration from more educated states affect school enrollment rates for the local population. The project builds on the notion that inequality in school enrollments can be explained by the origins of migrants who chose to live in a given county. Accordingly, internal migration was an important channel in the spread of schools in the US.

Using detailed historical data, the project examines specific channels through which migrants from more educated states improved the schooling outcomes of the locals. The project particularly focuses on the funding of schools through property taxes to consider that migrants from states with functioning public systems can be instrumental for more public funding for schools in their destinations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.