Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations

The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Hoyt Bleakley, Joseph Ferrie

Abstract

Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgia's Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in Georgia took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealth - a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants' underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children's human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than non-winners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners' grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners' grandchildren. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

References

Jul 1, 1986·Journal of Labor Economics·G S Becker, N Tomes
Jan 3, 2013·Medical Education·Alan Bleakley
Mar 14, 2014·Annals of Human Genetics·Edwin Francisco Herrera PazItalo Barrai

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Citations

May 2, 2018·The Journal of Economic History·Myron P GutmannEvan Roberts
Jan 1, 2018·Historical Methods·Catherine G MasseyAmy O'Hara
Oct 17, 2018·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Dora L CostaHeather DeSomer
Jun 26, 2021·Economics and Human Biology·Joerg Baten, Manuel Llorca-Jaña
Jul 24, 2021·Journal of Economic Literature·Martha BaileyCatherine Massey

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