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

Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph P. Ferrie

No 19348, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Does the lack of wealth constrain parents' investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of wealth to families. We track descendants of those eligible to win in Georgia's Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, which had nearly universal participation among adult white males. Winners received close to the median level of wealth - a large financial windfall orthogonal to parents' 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 transmission of human capital across generations and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines.

JEL-codes: J01 J13 J24 J62 N11 N31 O12 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published as Hoyt Bleakley & Joseph Ferrie, 2016. "Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol 131(3), pages 1455-1495.

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Journal Article: Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations (2016)
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