How effective are policies aimed at integrating isolated regions? We answer this question in the context of a highway system in one of the poorest regions in the United States. With construction starting in 1965, the Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) ultimately consisted of over 2,500 high-grade road miles. We use a simple model of interregional trade to motivate our empirical analysis, which quantifies the relationship between market access and income. We then calibrate the model to evaluate the aggregate impact of the ADHS and compare this with alternative counterfactual proposals. We find that removing the ADHS would have reduced total income by $53.7 billion in the United States, with $22 billion of the losses in Appalachian counties. Our findings highlight the potential aggregate benefits of transportation infrastructure policies and suggest that leakage outside the targeted area may be substantial.
World War II temporarily halted the rise in high school and college graduation rates. This article shows that manpower mobilization for World War II decreased educational attainment among high school-age females during the early 1940s, reduced employment and earnings, and altered decisions regarding family formation. I then provide evidence that women in this cohort returned to school in later life and relate these findings to the "quiet revolution" taking place as women learned about the benefits of school and work over the second half of the twentieth century."Education has been ever in the nation's service. But in these days of total war that service has a new significance. 'You're in the Army now' is no cliché-it is an expression of national necessity." 1 orld War II interrupted the schooling of many young women and men. Prior to the outbreak of the war, educational attainment in the United States increased steadily from at least the turn of the century. In 1910 fewer than 10 percent of 17-year-olds graduated from high school, by 1940 that number was more than 50 percent and increased still further to 70 percent by 1990. Immediately following U.S. entry into the war, high school graduation rates decreased sharply, falling back to their levels in the early 1930s, as depicted in Figure 1A.
When private incentives are insufficient, a big push by government may lead to industrialization. This article uses mobilization for WWII to test the big push hypothesis in the context of postwar industrialization in the American South. Specifically, I investigate the role of capital deepening at the county level using newly assembled data on the location and value of wartime investment. Despite a boom in manufacturing activity during the war, the evidence is not consistent with differential postwar growth in counties that received more investment. This does not rule out positive effects of mobilization on firms or sectors, but a decisive role for wartime capital deepening in the South's postwar industrial development should be viewed more skeptically.
This paper uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18 th and 19 th century developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their prey, the primary implication being that different ecological conditions lead to different rules of capture. Holding everything else constant, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely that the members of the community are civil-minded.
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